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LINKS

Manchester Central Library Sound Archive Blog

International Anthony Burgess Foundation

Burgess Foundation Free Weekly Newsletter

Burgess Foundation shop at Bookshop.org

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

In this episode, Graham Foster explores the military satire of The Anti-Death League by Kingsley Amis, with writer and academic Andrew James.

The Anti-Death League follows the soldiers of an army base that borders a quaint English village. They are preparing for the mysterious Operation Apollo, but there may be spies in their midst. As the preparations progress and the lives of the soldiers intersect with the inhabitants of the village, including a lustful aristocratic lady and a psychotherapist who may me more insane than his patients, Lieutenant James Churchill begins to question his purpose.

Kingsley Amis was born in 1922 in London. He wrote over twenty novels, the most famous being Lucky Jim, which also appears on Burgess’s list. He won the Booker in 1986 for The Old Devils and was knighted in 1990. He died in 1995.

Andrew James is currently a professor in the School of Commerce at Meiji University in Tokyo, where he conducts research in both literary biography and wine. He is the author of the books: Kingsley Amis: Antimodels and the Audience (McGill-Queen’s UP, 2013) and Bandol Wine and the Magic of Mourvèdre (Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2023).  His latest book is The Life of the Author: Graham Greene (Wiley Blackwell, 2025).

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BOOKS MENTIONED IN THIS EPISODE

By Kingsley Amis:

Lucky Jim (1954)

That Uncertain Feeling (1955)

Colonel Sun: A James Bond Adventure (1968)

Jake's Thing (1978)

Difficulties with Girls (1988)

By others:

A Clockwork Orange by Anthony Burgess (1962)

The Wanting Seed by Anthony Burgess (1962)

Honey for the Bears by Anthony Burgess (1963)

Albert Angelo by B.S. Johnson (1964)

A Vision of Battlements by Anthony Burgess (1965)

The Unfortunates by B.S. Johnson (1969)

Joysprick: An Introduction to the Language of James Joyce by Anthony Burgess (1973)

Earthly Powers by Anthony Burgess (1980)

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LINKS

The Life of the Author: Graham Greene by Andrew James

International Anthony Burgess Foundation

Burgess Foundation free weekly newsletter

The theme music for the Ninety-Nine Novels podcast is Anthony Burgess’s Concerto for Flute, Strings and Piano in D Minor, performed by No Dice Collective.

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

In this episode, Andrew Biswell explores the strange dystopia of The Old Men at the Zoo by Angus Wilson, with writer and academic Marina MacKay.

The Old Men at the Zoo is a novel of two halves. In the first, Simon Carter, secretary of London Zoo, is tempted by responsibility and power and forgoe his gifts as a naturalist. Yet, in their desire to set up a reserve for wild animals, the old men at the zoo are blind to the approaching chaos of nuclear war. In the second half, the zoo is taken over by a dystopian dictatorship and transformed into a concentration camp.

Angus Wilson was born in 1913. During the Second World War he worked as a codebreaker at Bletchley Park, after which he worked as a librarian in the British Museum’s Department of Printed Books. His first novel, Hemlock and After, was published in 1952 and was followed by seven more, including Late Call, which also appears on Anthony Burgess’s list. From 1966-1978 he was Professor of English at the University of East Anglia, where he co-founded, with Malcolm Bradbury, the famous Masters in Creative Writing. He was knighted in 1980 and died in 1991.

Marina MacKay is Professor of English Literature and a Fellow of St Peter’s College, University of Oxford. Her books include Modernism, War, and Violence (Bloomsbury, 2017) and Ian Watt: The Novel and the Wartime Critic (OUP, 2018). She is currently writing a book about British literature and culture in the 1950s.

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BOOKS MENTIONED IN THIS EPISODE

By Angus Wilson:

Anglo-Saxon Attitudes (1956)

The Middle Age of Mrs Eliot (1958)

Late Call (1964)

Diversity and Depth in Fiction: Selected Critical Writings (1983)

By others:

Northanger Abbey by Jane Austen (1818)

Bleak House by Charles Dickens (1853)

Our Mutual Friend by Charles Dickens (1865)

Strangers and Brothers by C.P. Snow (1940-70)

The Four Quartets by T.S. Eliot (1941)

Brideshead Revisited by Evelyn Waugh (1945)

A Dance to the Music of Time by Anthony Powell (1951-75)

The Novel Now by Anthony Burgess (1967)

Midnight's Children by Salman Rushdie (1981)

The White Hotel by D.M. Thomas (1981)

The Fourth Protocol by Frederick Forsyth (1984)

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LINKS

Modernism, War, and Violence by Marina MacKay

Ian Watt: The Novel and the Wartime Critic by Marina MacKay

International Anthony Burgess Foundation

The Burgess Foundation's free weekly newsletter

The theme music for the Ninety-Nine Novels podcast is Anthony Burgess’s Concerto for Flute, Strings and Piano in D Minor, performed by No Dice Collective.

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

In this episode, Graham Foster submits Philip Roth’s notorious novel Portnoy’s Complaint to examination with academic and writer Matthew Shipe.

Portnoy’s Complaint is structured as a monologue to a psychotherapist. Alex Portnoy reveals his inner life and obsessions, including his sexual predilections, his strange relationship with his mother, and his attendant feelings of shame. If the novel’s themes are shocking, Anthony Burgess praises Roth’s ‘great literary skill to make so fierce a theme the occasion for such uproarious comedy.’

Philip Roth was born in New Jersey in 1933. His first book was the story collection Goodbye, Columbus, which was released in 1959. He went on to write 28 novels, including The Human Stain, The Plot Against America, and American Pastoral, which won the Pulitzer Prize in 1997. Throughout most of his career, he taught comparative literature at the University of Pennsylvania. He died in 2018.

Matthew Shipe is a Teaching Professor in the English Department at Washington University in St Louis. He is the author of Understanding Philip Roth and the editor, with Scott Dill, of the collection Updike and Politics: New Considerations. In 2015, he won the John Updike Review's Emerging Writers Prize for his essay ‘The Long Goodbye: The Role of Memory in John Updike's Short Fiction.’ From 2016-2024, he served as the President of the Philip Roth Society. He currently serves as the co-executive editor of Philip Roth Studies and is on the Executive Board of the John Updike Society.

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BOOKS MENTIONED IN THIS EPISODE

By Philip Roth:

Goodbye, Columbus (1959)

Letting Go (1962)

When She Was Good (1967)

The Breast (1972)

The Ghost Writer (1979)

Zuckerman Unbound (1981)

The Counterlife (1986)

The Facts (1988)

Operation Shylock (1993)

Sabbath's Theater (1995)

American Pastoral (1997)

I Married A Communist (1999)

The Human Stain (2000)

The Plot Against America (2004)

Nemesis (2010)

By others:

Rabbit, Run by John Updike (1960)

Couples by John Updike (1968)

The Godfather by Mario Puzo (1969)

Fear of Flying by Erica Jong (1973)

The Coup by John Updike (1978)

Rabbit is Rich by John Updike (1981)

The Tunnel by William H. Gass (1995)

'Certainly the End of Something or Other, One Would Sort of Have to Think' in Consider the Lobster by David Foster Wallace (2005)

Dissident Gardens by Jonathan Lethem (2013)

Forest Dark by Nicole Krauss (2017)

Homeland Elegies by Ayad Akhtar (2020)

Small Rain by Garth Greenwell (2024)

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LINKS

Understanding Philip Roth by Matthew Shipe (affiliate link)

International Anthony Burgess Foundation

The Burgess Foundation's free Substack newsletter

The theme music for the Ninety-Nine Novels podcast is Anthony Burgess’s Concerto for Flute, Strings and Piano in D Minor, performed by No Dice Collective

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

In this episode, Will Carr heads to the dystopian future of Riddley Walker by Russell Hoban. His guide is writer and academic Graeme Wend-Walker.

Set 2000 years into the future, in an England dealing with the fallout from nuclear Armageddon, Riddley Walker concerns the adventures of a twelve-year-old as he discovers what lies outside his small community. The novel is narrated in an English that has degenerated over the years, so the reader discovers the world through a disorientating language. Burgess called the novel ‘a permanent contribution to literature.’

Russell Hoban was born in Pennsylvania in 1925. At the age of 18, he served as a radio operator for the US Army during World War II. After leaving the army, he made his name as an illustrator and an advertising copywriter. He began writing illustrated books for children in 1960. His first novel for adults was The Lion of Boaz-Jachin and Jachin-Boaz, published in 1973. He went on to write 15 more novels and more than 40 books for children. He died in 2011 in London.

Graeme Wend-Walker is a creative writer and a professor of literature at Texas State University. His scholarship is focused on writing for children and young adults, as well as science fiction, fantasy, and horror, and the folk traditions of Southeast Asia. His book Russell Hoban: Faithful to the Strange was published in 2025.

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BOOKS MENTIONED IN THIS EPISODE

By Russell Hoban:

How Tom Beat Captain Najork and his Hired Sportsmen (1974)

Kleinzeit (1974)

Turtle Diary (1975)

By others:

Things Fall Apart by Chinua Achebe (1958)

A Clockwork Orange by Anthony Burgess (1962)

Feersum Endjinn by Iain M. Banks (1994)

Katabasis by R.F. Kuang (2025)

What We Can Know by Ian McEwan (2025)

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LINKS

Russell Hoban: Faithful to the Strange by Graeme Wend-Walker

International Anthony Burgess Foundation

The Burgess Foundation's free Substack newsletter

The theme music for the Ninety-Nine Novels podcast is Anthony Burgess’s Concerto for Flute, Strings and Piano in D Minor, performed by No Dice Collective

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

In this episode, we’re exploring the heaven of Michael Frayn’s Sweet Dreams with Frayn expert Katrine Antonsen.

Sweet Dreams follows the afterlife of Howard Baker, a middle-class, educated professional. In the first chapter, he dies in a car accident and finds himself in a strange city which seems to be tailor made for him. As his afterlife progresses, he replaces leisure and enjoyment with a recreation of his earthly life, complete with his wife, his children and his friends. But the monotonous comfort of the celestial suburbs inspire him to go on a philosophical journey in the hope of meeting God.

Michael Frayn was born in 1933 in London, where he still lives. He is perhaps best known for his work for the stage, including the plays Noises Off and Copenhagen. He has written eleven novels, with Spies winning the Whitbread Prize for best novel in 2002. Frayn has also written memoir, journalism, philosophy, several screenplays, and translated the works of Anton Chekov and Leo Tolstoy.

Katrine Antonsen is currently a lecturer in English Literature at the Royal Norwegian Air Force Academy in Trondheim, Norway. She completed her PhD in the works of Micheal Frayn in 2018. She has written and lectured about Frayn in both Britain and Norway, and has introduced a Norwegian-language performance of Noises Off with a lecture at the Trøndelag Teater, Trondheim.

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BOOKS MENTIONED IN THIS EPISODE

By Michael Frayn:

A Very Private Life (1968)

Make and Break (1980)

Noises Off (1982)

A Landing on the Sun (1991)

Now You Know (1993)

Copenhagen (1998)

Spies (2002)

By others:

England, England by Julian Barnes (1998)

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LINKS

International Anthony Burgess Foundation

Burgess Foundation newsletter at Substack

The theme music for the Ninety-Nine Novels podcast is Anthony Burgess’s Concerto for Flute, Strings and Piano in D Minor, performed by No Dice Collective.

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

In this episode, Andrew Biswell talks to writer and critic Bob Batchelor about The Coup by John Updike, a novel Anthony Burgess called ‘a beautifully written disturbing lyric composition’.

The Coup focusses on Hakim Felix Ellellou, the former dictator of Kush, a fictional Islamic state in Africa. He looks back on his life and his time as ruler and documents the American involvement in the political life of his country. Through double-dealing and betrayal, the Americans are instrumental in inspiring a coup against Ellellou.

John Updike was born in Reading, Pennsylvania in 1932. He published his first novel, The Poorhouse Fair, in 1959. He is perhaps best known for the four novels that deal with the adventured of Rabbit Angstrom, and for The Witches of Eastwick, which was adapted into a film in 1987. He won the Pulitzer Prize in 1991 for his novel Rabbit at Rest. He died in 2009.

Bob Batchelor has written 16 books on subjects as wide as The Great Gatsby, Jim Morrison and the Doors, the Prohibition, and comic book writer Stan Lee. He has written extensively about John Updike, including the book John Updike: A Critical Biography. He has also presented the podcast series John Updike: American Writer, American Life. He is currently Assistant Professor in the Department of Communication, Media, and Culture at Coastal Carolina University.

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BOOKS MENTIONED IN THIS EPISODE

By John Updike:

Rabbit, Run (1960)

'Hub Fans Bid Kid Adieu' in the New Yorker (1960)

Rabbit Redux (1971)

Marry Me (1976)

Picked-Up Pieces (1976)

Rabbit is Rich (1981)

The Witches of Eastwick (1984)

Rabbit at Rest (1990)

Terrorist (2006)

By others:

Blue Eyes by Jerome Charyn (1975)

Maria La Davina by Jerome Charyn (2025)

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LINKS

Bob Batchelor online

John Updike: A Critical Biography by Bob Batchelor (affiliate link)

Stan Lee: The Man Behind Marvel by Bob Batchelor (affiliate link)

John Updike: American Writer, American Life podcast by Bob Batchelor

International Anthony Burgess Foundation

Burgess Foundation weekly newsletter on Substack

The theme music is Anthony Burgess's Concerto for Flute, Strings and Piano in D Minor. It is performed by No Dice Collective.

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

In this episode, Will Carr investigates the postmodern delights of The French Lieutenant’s Woman by John Fowles, with writer and editor Charles Drazin.

Telling the story of the meeting between the gentleman Charles Smithson and the disgraced Sarah Woodruff, The French Lieutenant’s Woman defies the conventions of the Victorian novels to which it pays homage. Putatively a love story, the narrative leads to multiple conflicting endings. Of the novel, Anthony Burgess wrote, ‘A very modern mind is manipulating us as well as the characters.’

John Fowles was born in 1926 in Essex. After training to join the navy, he studied at New College, Oxford, where he became interested in writing. After university, he became a teacher, holding posts in Britain, France and Greece, the latter inspiring the setting of his novel The Magus. His first novel, The Collector, was published in 1963, and he went on to write six more novels, a book of essays, a collection of poetry and several more non-fiction works. He died in 2005.

Charles Drazin is the editor of two volumes of journals by John Fowles. He has written about a variety of subjects. His books on film include In Search of The Third Man and The Faber Book of French Cinema. He has written the histories The Man Who Outshone the Sun King, which tells the story of Louis XIV’s finance minister Nicolas Foucquet; and Mapping the Past, which follows a family of Irish Catholic surveyors who mapped vast swathes of the British Empire. His most recent book, Making Hollywood Happen (2022), tells the inside story a little-known company that in the past seventy years has overseen the production of hundreds of the most celebrated movies ever made. He is currently working on the Faber Book of British Cinema.

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BOOKS MENTIONED IN THIS EPISODE

By John Fowles:

The Collector (1963)

A Maggot (1985)

Journals, Volumes One and Two (2003, 2006)

By others:

Orlando by Virginia Woolf (1928)

Wide Sargasso Sea by Jean Rhys (1966)

Beloved by Toni Morrison (1987)

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LINKS

Charles Drazin Online

Making Hollywood Happen by Charles Drazin

International Anthony Burgess Foundation

The Burgess Foundation Newsletter at Substack

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

In this episode, we’re learning about The Vendor of Sweets by R.K. Narayan with writer, editor and academic Claire Chambers.

The Vendor of Sweets tells the story of Jagan, a Hindu sweetmaker who strictly follows the principles of Mahatma Ghandi. When his layabout son, Mali, decides he wants to study creative writing in America, Jagan initially supports him, but when a newly westernised Mali returns to India with an American wife and a plan to manufacture novel-writing machines, Jagan’s patience wears thin.

R.K. Narayan was born in Madras (now Chennai), India in 1906. His first novel, Swami and Friends, was published in 1930 and introduced the world to Malgudi, the fictional Indian town in which many of Narayan’s subsequent novels, including The Vendor of Sweets, are set. In 1958, his novel The Guide, won him the National Prize of the Indian Literary Academy. Narayan wrote 15 novels, 9 books of non-fiction, and 6 collections of short stories. He died in 2001.

Claire Chambers is Professor of Global Literature at the University of York and a Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts. She specialises in literature from South Asia, the Perso-Arab world, and their diasporas. She is the author of ​several books, including ​​​Britain Through Muslim Eyes (2015), ​​​​Rivers of Ink​: Selected Essays​ (2017)​, and ​​​Making Sense of Contemporary British Muslim Novels (2019)​. She edited Desi Delicacies: Food Writing from Muslim South Asia (2021), co-edited ​​A Match Made in Heaven (2020), and co-authored Storying Relationships (2021)​​. Her forthcoming book is Decolonizing Disease: Pandemics, Public Health, and Pathogenic Novels and will be published by Liverpool University Press in 2026.

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BOOKS MENTIONED IN THIS EPISODE

By R.K. Narayan:

Malgudi Days (1943)

The Guide (1958)

By others:

Rayamana by Valmiki (c. 500 BCE)

Mahābhārata by Vyasa (c. 400 BCE)

Hind Swaraj by Mohandas Gandhi (1909)

Kanthapura by Raja Rao (1938)

Nineteen Eighty-Four by George Orwell (1949)

'Toba Tek Singh' in Mottled Dawn: Fifty Sketches and Stories of Partition by Saadat Hasan Manto (1955)

Yellowface by R.F. Kuang (2023)

The Centre by Ayesha Manazir Siddiqi (2023)

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LINKS

Making Sense of Contemporary British Muslim Novels by Claire Chambers (affiliate link)

Translation and Decolonisation, edited by Claire Chambers and Ipek Demir (affiliate link)

International Anthony Burgess Foundation

The Burgess Foundation's free Substack newsletter

The theme music for the Ninety-Nine Novels podcast is Anthony Burgess’s Concerto for Flute, Strings and Piano in D Minor, performed by No Dice Collective

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

In this episode, novelist and academic Norman Ravvin joins us to talk about Cocksure by Mordecai Richler, a novel Anthony Burgess called ‘grimly funny’.

Cocksure tells the story of Mortimer Griffin, a publisher whose routine life collides with the world of the Star Maker, a grotesque Hollywood movie producer who buys Mortimer’s publishing house and sets his life on a downward spiral. Mortimer suffers a breakdown of his marriage, has to contend with a school teaching the children the work of Marquis de Sade, and begins to question his identity as a Canadian Anglican. Eventually Mortimer uncovers the Star Maker’s horrific secret to making blockbuster movies.

Mordecai Richer was born in 1931 in Montreal, Canada. After working for the Canadian Broadcasting Service in the 1950s, he moved to London where he wrote seven of his novels, including Cocksure. Returning to Montreal in 1972, he wrote three more novels, including Barney’s Version, which was adapted into a film in 2010. Richler died in 2001.

Norman Ravvin is a writer, critic, and teacher. His publications include the novels The Girl Who Stole Everything, Café des Westens and Lola by Night. In 2023 he published Who Gets In: An Immigration Story, which blends memoir, history and archival work to tell the story of his grandfather's efforts to bring his family after him from Poland in the early 1930s. A native of Calgary, he lives in Montreal, where he teaches at Concordia University in the Department of Religions and Cultures.

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BOOKS MENTIONED IN THIS EPISODE

By Mordecai Richler:

The Apprenticeship of Duddy Kravitz (1959)

The Incomparable Atuk (1963)

St. Urbain's Horseman (1971)

Barney's Version (1997)

By others:

Frankenstein by Mary Shelley (1818)

The Wonderful Wizard of Oz by L. Frank Baum (1900)

Ulysses by James Joyce (1922)

Finnegans Wake by James Joyce (1939)

The Day of the Locust by Nathaniel West (1939)

Under the Volcano by Malcolm Lowry (1947)

Herzog by Saul Bellow (1964)

Dora Bruder by Patrick Modiano (1997)

The Plot Against America by Philip Roth (2004)

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LINKS

Norman Ravvin Online

Who Gets In: An Immigration Story by Norman Ravvin (affiliate link)

International Anthony Burgess Foundation

International Anthony Burgess Foundation's free Substack newsletter

The theme music for the Ninety-Nine Novels podcast is Anthony Burgess’s Concerto for Flute, Strings and Piano in D Minor, performed by No Dice Collective.

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

In this episode, Graham Foster explores the mysterious castle of Gormenghast, the setting of Titus Groan by Mervyn Peake, with writer and editor Rob Maslen.

Titus Groan begins with the birth of an heir to Lord Groan, the ruler of the castle of Gormenghast. As baby Titus comes into the world, the castle is beset by scheming and violence, primarily at the hands of Steerpike, an exceptionally clever, but malevolent, teenager. As he manipulates the other residents of the castle, his plotting threatens the traditions and rules that govern life within its walls, bringing madness and death to the Groan family.

Mervyn Peake was born in 1911 in China, where his father was a medical missionary. After returning to England in 1922, he studied at the Croydon School of Art and the Royal Academy of Art. After building a reputation as an artist and illustrator during the Second World War, he published the novels that make up the Gormenghast Trilogy between 1946 and 1959. He died in 1968. 

Rob Maslen is Emeritus Professor at the University of Glasgow. In 2015 he founded Glasgow’s MLitt in Fantasy, the first graduate programme in the world specifically dedicated to the study of fantasy and the fantastic, and from 2020 to 2022 he served as Co-director, with Professor Dimitra Fimi, of the Glasgow Centre for Fantasy and the Fantastic. He has written three books: Elizabethan Fictions (1997), Shakespeare and Comedy (2005), and The Shakespeare Handbook (2008), and has edited Mervyn Peake’s Collected Poems (2008), as well as co-editing  Mervyn Peake’s Complete Nonsense (2011). He has published many essays on early modern literature and twentieth-century fantasy and science fiction.

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BOOKS MENTIONED IN THIS EPISODE

By Mervyn Peake:

The Drawings of Mervyn Peake (1949)

Gormenghast (1950)

Titus Alone (1959)

Mervyn Peake: The Man and his Art (2008)

By others:

The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman by Laurence Sterne (1759-67)

The Rime of the Ancient Mariner by Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1798)

Moby-Dick by Herman Melville (1851)

Bleak House by Charles Dickens (1853)

Treasure Island by Robert Louis Stevenson (1883)

Peter Pan/Peter and Wendy by J.M. Barrie (1911)

Ulysses by James Joyce (1922)

The Castle by Franz Kafka (1926)

To the Lighthouse by Virginia Woolf (1927)

In Parenthesis by David Jones (1937)

The Aerodrome by Rex Warner (1941)

The Palm-Wine Drinkard by Amos Tutuola (1952)

The Lord of the Rings by J.R.R. Tolkien (1954-5)

The Famished Road by Ben Okri (1991)

Perdido Street Station by China Miéville (2000)

Under the Pendulum Sun by Jeanette Ng (2017)

Piranesi by Susanna Clarke (2020)

Babel by R.F. Kuang (2022)

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LINKS

The City of Lost Books, Rob Maslen's blog.

Mervyn Peake: Collected Poems, edited by Rob Maslen

Mervyn Peake: Complete Nonsense, edited by Rob Maslen and G. Peter Winnington

International Anthony Burgess Foundation

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Narrated by Andrew Biswell with readings from Ben Forkner's introduction to One Man's Chorus by Graham Foster.

Ben Forkner's interview was recorded in December 2024 over the telephone.

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LINKS

Read Ben Forkner's introduction to One Man's Chorus in full

International Anthony Burgess Foundation

Burgess Foundation free Substack newsletter

Burgess Foundation Bookshop

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

In this episode, writer and academic Sarah Graham leads Graham Foster through the 1940s Manhattan of The Catcher in the Rye by J.D. Salinger.

Published in 1951, The Catcher in the Rye follows Holden Caulfield, a bereaved teenager who recalls a weekend spent in Manhattan after he is expelled from boarding school. As he tells his story of wandering the streets looking for some form of connection in seedy hotels, bars, and nightclubs, he gradually reveals his own state of mind and his desire to rebel against the society that he doesn’t understand.

J.D. Salinger was born in New York in 1919. After participating in some of the most consequential battles of World War II, he began writing short stories for the New Yorker, many of which centred around the Glass family. After publishing the short story collections Nine Stories (1953) and Franny and Zooey (1961), and the volume of two novellas Raise High the Roof Beam, Carpenters and Seymour: An Introduction (1963), he retired from public life. He died in 2010.

Sarah Graham is Associate Professor in American Literature at the University of Leicester. Her most recent publications are A History of the Bildungsroman (CUP, 2019) and reviews of American fiction for the Times Literary Supplement. She published a reader’s guide to The Catcher in the Rye in 2007 (Continuum), edited a collection of essays on the novel for Routledge (2007), and has contributed to magazines, conferences and programmes discussing Salinger’s work, including ‘J. D. Salinger: Made in England’ for BBC Radio 4.

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BOOKS MENTIONED IN THIS EPISODE

By J.D. Salinger:

Nine Stories (1953)

By others:

David Copperfield by Charles Dickens (1850)

The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain (1884)

The Kit Book for Soldiers, Sailors, and Marines (1943)

A Clockwork Orange by Anthony Burgess (1962)

Demon Copperhead by Barbara Kingsolver (2022)

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LINKS

Salinger's The Catcher in the Rye: A Reader's Guide by Sarah Graham

A History of the Bildungsroman, edited by Sarah Graham

International Anthony Burgess Foundation

Burgess Foundation's Free Substack Newsletter

The theme music for the Ninety-Nine Novels podcast is Anthony Burgess’s Concerto for Flute, Strings and Piano in D Minor, performed by No Dice Collective. 

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

In this episode, we’re joined by novelist Adam Roberts, who introduces us to Life in the West by Brian Aldiss.

Life in the West tells the story of Thomas Squire, a filmmaker who is attending an academic conference to introduce his new documentary, Frankenstein in the Arts. At the conference he engages in conversations with the other attendees while dealing with the dissolution of his marriage, the trauma of his childhood and the violent years he spent in Yugoslavia as a member of British intelligence. Anthony Burgess calls the novel ‘a rich book, not afraid of thought.’

Brain Aldiss was born in 1925. After serving in Burma during World War II he worked as a bookseller in Oxford, which was the inspiration for his first novel The Brightfount Diaries, published in 1955. He went on to become one of the most respected British science fiction writers, writing 41 novels, 26 collections of short stories, 8 volumes of poetry, 5 volumes of autobiography and many more works of literary criticism, drama and edited anthologies. He died in 2017 at the age of 92.

Adam Roberts is a writer and an academic at Royal Holloway, University of London. His most recent novel, Lake of Darkness is available now. A History of Fantasy is forthcoming from Bloomsbury (2025).

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BOOKS MENTIONED IN THIS EPISODE

By Brian Aldiss:

Hothouse (1962)

Greybeard (1964)

Billion Year Spree: The History of Science Fiction (1973)

Frankenstein Unbound (1973)

Helliconia Trilogy (1982-85)

Trillion Year Spree: The History of Science Fiction (1986)

Forgotten Life (1988)

Bury My Heart at W.H. Smith's: A Writing Life (1990)

Remembrance Day (1993)

Twinkling of an Eye, or My Life as an Englishman (1998)

Somewhere East of Life (1994)

'Supertoys Last All Summer Long' in The Complete Short Stories: The 1960s Part 2 (2015)

By others:

Frankenstein by Mary Shelley (1818)

Nineteen Eighty-Four by George Orwell (1949)

The Lord of the Rings by J.R.R. Tolkien (1955)

A Clockwork Orange by Anthony Burgess (1962)

Earthly Powers by Anthony Burgess (1980)

The Names by Don DeLillo (1982)

Small World by David Lodge (1984)

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LINKS

Lake of Darkness by Adam Roberts (affiliate link)

Fantasy: A Short History by Adam Roberts (forthcoming)

Adam Roberts's blog at Medium

International Anthony Burgess Foundation

Burgess Foundation's newsletter at Substack

The theme music for the Ninety-Nine Novels podcast is Anthony Burgess’s Concerto for Flute, Strings and Piano in D Minor, performed by No Dice Collective.

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

In this episode, Will Carr is joined by writer and academic Paul Fagan to discuss At Swim-Two-Birds by Flann O’Brien.

At Swim-Two-Birds is narrated by a young undergraduate student who invents wild stories featuring a host of strange character. The novel consists of three of the student’s seemingly unlinked stories that introduce characters such as Furriskey who is a fictional character created by the equally fictional Trellis, a writer of Westerns. As the narrative progresses, the student’s characters seem to take on a life of their own, and the novel becomes an absurdist brew of Irish folklore, farce, and comedic satire.

Flann O’Brien was born Brian Ó Nualláin in County Tyrone, Ireland in 1911. After studying at University College Dublin he joined the Irish Civil Service, during which time he wrote novels in both English and Irish Gaelic, scripts for television and theatre, and newspaper columns as Myles na gCopaleen. He died in 1966.

Paul Fagan is a Government of Ireland Postdoctoral Fellow at Maynooth University, where he is working on the Irish Research Council project Celibacy in Irish Women's Writing, 1860s-1950s. He is a co-founder of the International Flann O’Brien Society, a founding general editor of the Journal of Flann O’Brien Studies. He is the co-editor of Finnegans Wake: Human and Nonhuman Histories, Irish Modernisms: Gaps, Conjectures, Possibilities, as well as five edited volumes on Flann O’Brien.

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BOOKS MENTIONED IN THIS EPISODE

By Flann O'Brien:

An Béal Bocht (1941)

The Hard Life (1961)

The Dalkey Archive (1964)

The Third Policeman (1967)

The Best of Myles (1968)

By others:

The Golden Ass by Apuleius (c. 200)

The Fenian Cycle (from c. 600)

The Madness of Sweeney (c. 1200)

Don Quixote by Miguel de Cervantes (1605-15)

Hamlet by William Shakespeare (1623)

A Tale of a Tub by Jonathan Swift (1704)

The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman by Laurence Sterne (1759)

The Crock of Gold by James Stephens (1912)

Orlando by Virginia Woolf (1928)

Finnegans Wake by James Joyce (1939)

Travelling People by BS Johnson (1963)

If on a Winter's Night a Traveller by Italo Calvino (1979)

Mulligan Stew by Gilbert Sorrentino (1979)

Lanark by Alasdair Gray (1981)

Blooms of Dublin by Anthony Burgess (1982)

A Colder Eye: The Modern Irish Writers by Hugh Kenner (1983)

House of Leaves by Mark Z Danielewski (2000)

Milkman by Anna Burns (2018)

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LINKS

Finnegans Wake: Human and Nonhuman Histories, edited by Paul Fagan and Richard Barlow

International Anthony Burgess Foundation

Burgess Foundation Substack

The theme music for the Ninety-Nine Novels podcast is Anthony Burgess’s Concerto for Flute, Strings and Piano in D Minor, performed by No Dice Collective 

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In this episode, we’re getting the intel on Catch-22 by Joseph Heller from our guest Spencer Morrison.

Catch-22 takes us back to the dying days of the Second World War and introduces us to Yossarian, a US Air Force bombardier who is stationed on an island off the coast of Italy. Yossarian’s traumatic missions are contrasted with his life on the base, which is populated by various oddball airmen who all have their own agendas. They are overseen by commanding officers who are more concerned with abstract bureaucracy and arbitrary rules than the reality of the war. When Yossarian attempts to get out of flying any more missions he is faced with the most insidious rule of all, Catch-22, which states if an airman flies missions he is crazy and doesn’t have to, but if he doesn’t want to fly missions then he is sane and has to.

Joseph Heller was born in Brooklyn in 1923. In 1942, he joined the US Air Force and served as a bombardier on the Italian Front, his experiences informing Catch-22. His first published story appeared in Atlantic magazine in 1948 while he was working as a copywriter for an advertising firm. He went on to write seven novels, a collection of short stories, three plays, three screenplays and two volumes of autobiography. In the 1970s he worked alongside Anthony Burgess in the Creative Writing department at City College New York. He died in 1999.

Spencer Morrison is an assistant professor of English Language and Culture at the University of Groningen, in the Netherlands, where he specializes in post-WWII American literature. His writing has been published, or is forthcoming, in journals such as American Literary History, ELH, American Literature, and Genre, and he's currently completing a book manuscript on fifties and sixties American literature and culture that includes a chapter on Joseph Heller. 

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BOOKS MENTIONED IN THIS EPISODE:

By Joseph Heller:

Something Happened (1974)

By others:

The Good Soldier Švejk by Jaroslav Hašek (1921)

Journey to the End of the Night by Louis-Ferdinand Céline (1932)

The Gallery by John Horne Burns (1947)

The Naked and the Dead by Norman Mailer (1948)

The Lonely Crowd by David Riesman, Nathan Glazer, and Reuel Denney (1950)

From Here to Eternity by James Jones (1951)

Wise Blood by Flannery O'Connor (1952)

Lucky Jim by Kingsley Amis (1954)

The Organization Man by William H Whyte (1956)

On the Road by Jack Kerouac (1957)

The Thin Red Line by James Jones (1962)

Portnoy's Complaint by Philip Roth (1969)

Slaughterhouse Five by Kurt Vonnegut (1969)

Gravity's Rainbow by Thomas Pynchon (1973)

The White Boy Shuffle by Paul Beatty (1996)

Infinite Jest by David Foster Wallace (1996)

The Sellout by Paul Beatty (2015)

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LINKS

International Anthony Burgess Foundation

The Burgess Foundation's free Substack newsletter

The theme music for the Ninety-Nine Novels podcast is Anthony Burgess’s Concerto for Flute, Strings and Piano in D Minor, performed by No Dice Collective. 

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

In this episode, we’re learning about The History Man by Malcolm Bradbury, with our guest Joseph Williams.

The History Man tells the story of Howard Kirk, a sociology professor at a modern campus university. Howard is a strident and radical political voice on campus who dominates both his fellow lecturers and his students with his opinions and encourages sit-ins and protests for all manner of causes. Howard is also morally compromised: he has affairs with his female students while simultaneously bullying his male students, and his frequent lies destroy his colleagues’ careers even as they bring him success. Burgess calls The History Man ‘a disturbing and accurate portrayal of campus life in the late sixties and early seventies.’

Malcolm Bradbury was born in 1932. He wrote six novels, of which The History Man is the most well-known, having been adapted for the screen in 1981. He also wrote a novella, a collection of short stories, several well-respected books of literary criticism and many scripts for television. He also set up the famous MA in Creative Writing at the University of East Anglia, which launched the careers of Ian McEwan and Kazuo Ishiguro among others. He was knighted for services to literature in 2000 and died the same year at the age of 68.

Joseph Williams is finishing a PhD at the University of East Anglia, researching the creative, critical and educational work of Malcolm Bradbury, Lorna Sage, David Lodge, and the journal Critical Quarterly. He has taught at UEA and now teaches for the Workers Educational Association, most recently a course on Ulysses. As a reviewer he has written for Literary Review, The Times Literary Supplement, the Spectator, and Tribune, and in 2023 he was appointed reviews editor at Critical Quarterly. 

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BOOKS MENTIONED IN THIS EPISODE

By Malcolm Bradbury:

Eating People is Wrong (1959)

Stepping Westward (1965)

The Social Context of Modern English Literature (1971)

The Modern American Novel (1983)

The Modern World: Ten Great Writers (1988)

The Modern British Novel (1993)

By others:

Ulysses by James Joyce (1922)

Finnegans Wake by James Joyce (1939)

Loving by Henry Green (1945)

The Great Tradition by F.R. Leavis (1948)

Lucky Jim by Kingsley Amis (1954)

The Rachel Papers by Martin Amis (1973)

Heat and Dust by Ruth Prawer Jhabvala (1975)

Gossip from the Forest by Thomas Keneally (1975)

Changing Places by David Lodge (1975)

How Far Can You Go? by David Lodge (1980)

Midnight's Children by Salman Rushdie (1981)

Money by Martin Amis (1984)

Small World by David Lodge (1984)

White Noise by Don DeLillo (1985)

Nice Work by David Lodge (1988)

The Secret History by Donna Tartt (1992)

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LINKS

International Anthony Burgess Foundation

Burgess Foundation Newsletter

The theme music for the Ninety-Nine Novels podcast is Anthony Burgess’s Concerto for Flute, Strings and Piano in D Minor, performed by No Dice Collective.

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

In this episode, we’re exploring the complex, controversial and language-rich novel Darconville’s Cat by Alexander Theroux with our guest, writer George Salis.

The novel tells the story of Alaric Darconville, an English instructor at an all-girls’ college in Virginia. He is intensely romantic and intellectual, and eventually falls in love with one of his students. He views their relationship as a great love affair, but his romanticism blinds him to reality. Eventually, he meets the mysterious Dr Crucifer, an unrepentant misogynist who attempt to brainwash the younger man to his way of thinking.

Alexander Theroux was born in Massachusetts in 1939, and is the author of four novels, four collections of poetry, three collections of short stories and several works of non-fiction. His most recent publication is the collection of poetry, Godfather Drosselmeier’s Tears & Other Poems. 

George Salis is a novelist, literary critic and editor. His novel Sea Above, Sun Below was praised by Alexander Theroux as having ‘electricity on every page’. He is the editor of The Colliderscope, an online publication that celebrates innovative literature, and the host of its companion podcast. He has recently completed his maximalist novel Morphological Echoes.

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BOOKS MENTIONED IN THIS EPISODE

By Alexander Theroux

Three Wogs, including 'Theroux Metaphrastes' (1972)

Laura Warholic (2007)

By others:

Moby-Dick by Herman Melville (1851)

Ulysses by James Joyce (1922)

Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov (1955)

Girls at Play by Paul Theroux (1969)

Plus by Joseph McElroy (1977)

Love in a Dead Language by Lee Siegel (1999)

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LINKS

Sea Above, Sun Below by George Salis at Amazon

The Collidescope, George Salis's website

The Collidescope Podcast

International Anthony Burgess Foundation

The theme music for the Ninety-Nine Novels podcast is Anthony Burgess’s Concerto for Flute, Strings and Piano in D Minor, performed by No Dice Collective.

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

In this episode, Graham Foster discovers Nadine Gordimer’s 1966 novel The Late Bourgeois World, with guest Jeanne-Marie Jackson.

The Late Bourgeois World tells the story of Johannesburg suburbanite Liz Van Den Sandt, who finds out her ex-husband has committed suicide after betraying his comrades in the burgeoning rebellion against apartheid. Though she lives a privileged life with her new partner, she begins to feel drawn towards political action. When she is asked to help the Black Nationalist movement with their finances, she has to choose between her own safe but boring life and the exciting but risky act of rebellion. But does her ex-husband’s failure prove the futility of political action?

Nadine Gordimer was born in the Transvaal region of South Africa in 1923. She moved to Johannesburg in 1948 and lived in the city for the rest of her life. She published her first novel, The Lying Days, in 1953 and went on to publish 14 more novels and over 20 books of short stories. Gordimer won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1991. She died in 2014.

Jeanne-Marie Jackson is Professor of English at Johns Hopkins University. Her research focusses on African literature and intellectual history. Her first book, South African Literature’s Russian Soul: Narrative Forms of Global Isolation was published by Bloomsbury in 2015. Her most recent book, The African Novel of Ideas: Philosophy and Individualism in the Age of Global Writing was published by Princeton University Press in 2021. She has written for the New York Times, New Left Review, and The Conversation, among others. Her latest book, as editor, is a critical edition of J.E. Casely Hayford’s Ethiopia Unbound.

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BOOKS MENTIONED IN THIS EPISODE

By Nadine Gordimer:

The Lying Days (1953)

Burger's Daughter (1979)

July's People (1981)

'Living in the Interregnum' in The Essential Gesture: Writing, Politics and Places (1988)

By others:

Fathers and Sons by Ivan Turgenev (1862)

The Stranger by Albert Camus (1942)

The Ripley Series by Patricia Highsmith (1955-91)

The Necessity of Art by Ernst Fischer (1959)

Muriel at Metropolitan by Miriam Tlali (1975)

Edith's Diary by Patricia Highsmith (1977)

Amandla by Miriam Tlali (1980)

Disgrace by J.M. Coetzee (1999)

The Theory of Flight by Siphiwe Gloria Ndlovu (2018)

The History of Man by Siphiwe Gloria Ndlovu (2019)

The Quality of Mercy by Siphiwe Gloria Ndlovu (2022)

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LINKS

South African Literature’s Russian Soul: Narrative Forms of Global Isolation by Jeanne-Marie Jackson

The African Novel of Ideas: Philosophy and Individualism in the Age of Global Writing by Jeanne-Marie Jackson

International Anthony Burgess Foundation

The Burgess Foundation's free Substack newsletter

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

In this episode, Andrew Biswell talks to Brian Boyd about Vladimir Nabokov’s novel Pale Fire, which Anthony Burgess called ‘a brilliant confection’.

Pale Fire is unlike any other novel. The first section of the novel takes the form of a 999-line poem, by a murdered poet called John Shade. The second section concerns the discursive commentary and notes by Shade’s supposed editor, Charles Kinbote. Seemingly unconnected to the poem, Kinbote’s notes describe his belief that he is Charles the Beloved, the exiled king of a country called Zembla. Can this be true, or is Kinbote a fantasist? Does Shade’s poem really reference the revolution in Zembla? Is Shade even real? These are just some of the questions raised by this rich and puzzling novel.

Vladimir Nabokov was born in St Petersburg in 1899, and being of aristocratic heritage, was exiled from Russia when the Bolsheviks seized power. Having studied in Britain, he settled in America in 1940, lecturing in Russian literature at Wellesley College in Massachusetts and Cornell University in New York State. His novel Lolita, published in 1955, brought him fame, and was filmed by Stanley Kubrick, from Nabokov’s own screenplay, in 1962. Nabokov died in Switzerland in 1977.

Brian Boyd is University Distinguished Professor of English Emeritus at the University of Auckland, New Zealand and one of the leading experts in Nabokov’s work. His writings about Nabokov include Nabokov’s Ada: The Place of Consciousness, Nabokov’s Pale Fire: The Magic of Artistic Discovery, and two volumes of biography subtitled The Russian Years and The American Years. He is currently working on a biography of the philosopher Karl Popper, along with a follow-up to his On the Origin of Stories: Evolution, Cognition, and Fiction; a book on Shakespeare’s plays; two books on Lolita; and a continuation of his annotations, a chapter at a time, to Ada, already almost 2500 pages, with about 500 to go. He is also co-editing Nabokov’s Lectures on Russian Poetry, Prose, and Drama.

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BOOKS MENTIONED IN THIS EPISODE

By Vladimir Nabokov:

The Defense (1930)

Lolita (1955)

Ada or Ardor: A Family Chronicle (1969)

Transparent Things (1972)

'The Vane Sisters' in The Stories of Vladimir Nabokov (1995)

By others:

Gradus ad Parnassum by Johann Joseph Fux (1725)

Ulysses by James Joyce (1922)

The Joy of Gay Sex by Edmund White (1977)

A Strangeness in My Mind by Orhan Pamuk (2015)

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LINKS

Nabokov's Pale Fire: The Magic of Artistic Discovery by Brian Boyd (affiliate link)

International Anthony Burgess Foundation

International Anthony Burgess Foundation Newsletter

The theme music for the Ninety-Nine Novels podcast is Anthony Burgess’s Concerto for Flute, Strings and Piano in D Minor, performed by No Dice Collective. 

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The Devil Prefers Mozart is the first collection of Anthony Burgess’s essays on music and musicians. This wide-ranging anthology covers classical, modern and operatic works, as well as jazz, pop, heavy metal and punk. This episode of the podcast discusses the versatility of Burgess’s writing on music, the different sorts of essays in the new collection and what Burgess really thought of the work of the Beatles.

Paul Phillips is the Gretchen B. Kimball Director of Orchestral Studies and Associate Professor of Music at Stanford University, and author A Clockwork Counterpoint: The Music and Literature of Anthony Burgess, the definitive study of Burgess’s music and its relationship to his writing. Paul has contributed essays to six books on Burgess, including the Norton Critical Edition of A Clockwork Orange, and is an Honorary Patron of the International Anthony Burgess Foundation and its Music Advisor.

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LINKS

The Devil Prefers Mozart: On Music and Musicians by Anthony Burgess, edited by Paul Phillips at Carcanet

The Clockwork Counterpoint: The Music and Literature of Anthony Burgess by Paul Phillips (affiliate link)

International Anthony Burgess Foundation

Anthony Burgess News, our free weekly Substack newsletter.

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Richard Cohen is the former publishing director of Hutchinson, and was instrumental in publishing some of Burgess’s best known novels of the 1980s, beginning with The Pianoplayers in 1986. After working at Hutchinson, Richard moved to Hodder, and eventually set up his own company Richard Cohen Books. During his time in publishing he worked with authors as varied as Jeffrey Archer, John Le Carre, Kingsley Amis, Fay Wheldon. Sebastian Faulks, and Rudy Giuliani.

As a writer, Richard has published four books of non-fiction: By the Sword, a history of swordplay; Chasing the Sun, an epic history of the Sun; How to Write Like Tolstoy, a guide for writers; and Making History, a history of historians from Herodotus to the present day.

Richard was also an Olympic fencer, competing in Munich, Montreal and Los Angeles between 1972 and 1984. He won both a gold and bronze medal for fencing at the 1970 Commonwealth Games in Edinburgh.

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LINKS

Making History: Making History: The Storytellers Who Shaped the Past by Richard Cohen (affiliate link)

By the Sword: A History of Gladiators, Musketeers, Samurai, Swashbucklers, and Olympic Champions by Richard Cohen (affiliate link)

Chasing the Sun: The Epic Story of the Star that Gives Us Life by Richard Cohen (affiliate link)

How to Write Like Tolstoy by Richard Cohen (affiliate link)

International Anthony Burgess Foundation

Subscribe to the Burgess Foundation's free newsletter for weekly news, event listings and writing by and about Anthony Burgess.

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A Clockwork Orange: The Prophecy, is the first new documentary to focus on Burgess for 25 years. Drawing on archive footage, startling new animations, and interviews with major cultural figures such as Will Self and Ai Weiwei, this documentary reconsiders the 60-year history of A Clockwork Orange as a novel, film, stage play and cultural influence.

LINKS:

To watch the French version, Orange méchanique: les rouages de la violence, click here.

To watch the German version, Clockwork Orange: Im Räderwerk der Gewalt, click here.

International Anthony Burgess Foundation

Sign up to our free newsletter

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Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year to all of our listeners! We'll be back in 2024 with more podcasts.

For more information about Anthony Burgess and to find out how you can support the work of the Burgess Foundation, visit our website.

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Lanark is a strange, experimental book that immediately thrusts the reader into a weird world with glimmers of familiarity. It’s a novel with two stories, that weave around each other but don’t quite come together in an obvious way. It begins with the story of a man called Lanark, whose lonely existence in the city of Unthank is eventually disturbed when his skin begins to grow dragon scales. This story is interrupted by that of Duncan Thaw, who remembers his journey to become an artist, studying at the Glasgow School of Art and struggling to get by painting murals around the city. What, if anything, is the connection between Thaw and Lanark?

Alasdair Gray was born in Riddrie, Glasgow in 1934. He began studying at the Glasgow School of Art in 1953, where he started writing Lanark. He graduated in 1957 and painted murals around Glasgow. Many of his murals have been lost, but some  can still be seen around the city. Most famously, his mural at the Òran Mór theatre is the largest public artwork in Scotland. Alongside his career as an artist he wrote nine novels, five collections of short stories, and several works for the theatre. He died in 2019.

Rodge Glass is the author of seven published books across fiction, the graphic novel, the short story and nonfiction, including Alasdair Gray: A Secretary's Biography, which won a Somerset Maugham Award for Nonfiction, and his new book Michel Faber: The Writer & his Work, published by Liverpool University Press in August 2023. He is a Senior Lecturer in Creative Writing at the University of Strathclyde in Glasgow and was the Convener of the 2nd International Alasdair Gray Conference hosted in Glasgow in 2022. He works closely with the Alasdair Gray Archive on creative commissions, academic work and on building Gray's legacy internationally.

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BOOKS MENTIONED IN THIS EPISODE

By Alasdair Gray:

'The Star' in Unlikely Stories, Mostly (1983)

1982, Janine (1984)

The Fall of Kelvin Walker (1985)

Poor Things (1992)

A Life in Pictures (2009)

By others:

Leviathan by Thomas Hobbes (1651)

'The Crystal Egg' in The Country of the Blind and Other Selected Stories by HG Wells (1897)

Finnegans Wake by James Joyce (1939)

Alasdair Gray: A Secretary's Biography by Rodge Glass (2009)

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LINKS

Alasdair Gray: A Secretary's Biography by Rodge Glass (affiliate link)

Michel Faber: The Writer & His Work by Rodge Glass (affiliate link)

The Alasdair Gray Archive

International Anthony Burgess Foundation

The theme music for the Ninety-Nine Novels podcast is Anthony Burgess’s Concerto for Flute, Strings and Piano in D Minor, performed by No Dice Collective.

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In this episode, Graham Foster explores pre-civil rights America in Ralph Ellison’s 1952 novel Invisible Man, with writer and academic Sterling L. Bland Jr.

Invisible Man follows a nameless black narrator, from his early life as a student of an all-black college based on the Tuskegee Institute, through his expulsion and move to New York where he takes up a series of low status jobs before he falls in with a radical political group called The Brotherhood and takes part in a race riot in Harlem. The novel is part bildungsroman, part satire, and full of literary allusion, allegory and rich imagery. It’s also an impassioned commentary on the black experience in an America marked by segregation, inequality and racism.

Ralph Ellison was born in Oklahoma in 1914. He discovered the power of literature at the Tuskegee Institute, even though he left before graduating. In 1936, he moved to New York, meeting writers Langston Hughes and Richard Wright. Invisible Man was the only novel published in his lifetime, though he also published two volumes of essays. Since his death in 1994, his second, unfinished, novel was published in 1999 under the title Juneteenth. A longer version of this novel was published in 2010 under the title Three Days Before the Shooting… There have also been two further volumes of essays, a collection of short stories, and two selections of his letters.

Sterling Lecater Bland, Jr. is a professor in the departments of English, Africana Studies, and American Studies at Rutgers University-Newark. He is the author of Voices of the Fugitives: Runaway Slave Stories and Their Fictions of Self-Creation and Understanding Nineteenth Century Slave Narratives. He has written extensively about Ralph Ellison and contributed essays to books such as Approaches to Teaching the Works of Ralph Ellison, and Ralph Ellison in Context. His most recent book is In the Shadow of Invisibility: Ralph Ellison and the Promise of American Democracy.

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BOOKS MENTIONED IN THIS EPISODE

By Ralph Ellison:

Shadow and Act: Essays (1964)

Going to the Territory: Essays (1986)

Juneteenth (1999), also published in a longer form as Three Days Before the Shooting... (2010)

By others:

The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain (1884)

Light in August by William Faulkner (1932)

Native Son by Richard Wright (1940)

The Mansion by William Faulkner (1959)

The Bluest Eye by Toni Morrison (1970)

Song of Solomon by Toni Morrison (1977)

The Intuitionist by Colson Whitehead (1999)

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LINKS

In the Shadow of Invisibility: Ralph Ellison and the Promise of American Democracy by Sterling L. Bland Jr. (affiliate link)

Ralph Ellison Foundation

International Anthony Burgess Foundation

The theme music is Anthony Burgess’s Concerto for Flute, Strings and Piano in D Minor, and is performed by No Dice Collective.

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

In this episode, Will Carr explores the world of Anthony Powell’s A Dance to the Music of Time with writer and academic Nicholas Birns.

A Dance to the Music of Time is a twelve-volume roman-fleuve following fifty years in the life of the narrator Nick Jenkins from his schooldays in the 1920s through the Second World War to his later years at the beginning of the 1970s.

Anthony Powell was born in Westminster, London in 1905. As well as the twelve volumes of A Dance to the Music of Time, he wrote seven further novels, four volumes of memoir, several plays and various works of non-fiction. He died in 2000, aged 94.

Nicholas Birns is on the faculty of New York University, where he teaches contemporary world literature in English. His most recent book is The Cambridge Companion to the Australian Novel which he co-edited with Louis Klee. His first book Understanding Anthony Powell appeared in 2004 and he is a founding member of the Anthony Powell Society.

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BOOKS MENTIONED IN THIS EPISODE

David Copperfield by Charles Dickens (1850)

War and Peace by Leo Tolstoy (1867)

The Forsyte Saga by John Galsworthy (1906-21)

Remembrance of Things Past by Marcel Proust (1913-27)

Ulysses by James Joyce (1922)

The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald (1925)

Decline and Fall by Evelyn Waugh (1928)

Vile Bodies by Evelyn Waugh (1930)

The Malayan Trilogy by Anthony Burgess (1956-9)

Owls Do Cry by Janet Frame (1957)

Riders in the Chariot by Patrick White (1961)

Alms for Oblivion by Simon Raven (1964-76)

The Novel Now by Anthony Burgess (1967)

The Novels of Anthony Powell by Robert K Morris (1968)

Invitation to Dance: A Handbook to Anthony Powell's A Dance to the Music of Time by Hilary Spurling (1977)

The Novels of Anthony Powell by James Tucker (1977)

The Harpur and Iles Series by Bill James (1985-2019)

The Lampitt Chronicles by A.N. Wilson (1988-96)

The Night Soldiers Series by Alan Furst (1988-2019)

The Emperor's Children by Claire Messud (2006)

Dance Class: American High-School Students Encounter Anthony Powell's Dance to the Music of Time compiled by John A Gould (2009)

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LINKS

Understanding Anthony Powell by Nicholas Birns

Nicholas Birns on Twitter and Instagram

The Anthony Powell Society

International Anthony Burgess Foundation

The theme music is Anthony Burgess’s Concerto for Flute, Strings and Piano in D Minor, and is performed by No Dice Collective.

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In this episode, Graham Foster assesses the dystopian threats of Rex Warner's 1942 novel The Aerodrome. Writer and academic Joseph Darlington guides us through Warner’s politics, his representations of England and whether or not the novel is truly a dystopia.

The Aerodrome is set in a nameless but idyllic rural village, where the inhabitants live rough but blameless lives attending church, frequenting the pub and enjoying village fetes. But on a hill overlooking the village, a mysterious militaristic aerodrome has been constructed, and threatens to overwhelm the entire countryside. Our hero Roy, disillusioned with village life, attempts to resist the lure of the Air-Vice Marshall, a charismatic leader who promises order and excitement.

Rex Warner was born in Birmingham in 1905, and was a renowned classicist, writer, poet and translator. He attended Wadham College, Oxford, where he became friends with W.H. Auden, Stephen Spender and Cecil Day-Lewis. During the 1930s he developed strong anti-fascist beliefs, something reflected in his first three novels: The Wild Goose Chase, The Professor, and The Aerodrome. He wrote seven further novels, three books of poetry, and  many volumes of non-fiction including translations from Ancient Greek and Latin. His translation of Thucydides’s History of the Peloponnesian War for Penguin Classics sold over a million copies, and is still in print today. He died in 1973.

Joseph Darlington is the author of The Experimentalists, published by Bloomsbury, a collective biography of British experimental novelists of the 1960s. He is also the author of the novel The Girl Beneath the Ice, published by Northodox, and the co-editor of the Manchester Review of Books.

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BOOKS MENTIONED IN THIS EPISODE

By Rex Warner:

The Wild Goose Chase (1937)

The Professor (1938)

Thucydides, History of the Peloponnesian War (translation, 1954)

By others;

Reflections on the Revolution in France by Edmund Burke (1790)

The Mayor of Casterbridge by Thomas Hardy (1886)

The Castle by Franz Kafka (1926)

Brave New World by Aldous Huxley (1932)

Quack! Quack! by Leonard Woolf (1935)

Swastika Night by Katherine Burdekin (1937)

The Road to Wigan Pier by George Orwell (1937)

Nineteen Eighty-Four by George Orwell (1949)

A Clockwork Orange by Anthony Burgess (1962)

1985 by Anthony Burgess (1978)

The Handmaid's Tale by Margaret Atwood (1985)

The Mushroom Jungle: A History of Postwar Paperback Publishing by Steve Holland (1993)

The Mortmere Stories by Christopher Isherwood and Edward Upward (1994)

The Wall by John Lanchester (2019)

The Death of H.L. Hix by H.L. Hix (2021)

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LINKS

The Experimentalists by Joseph Darlington at Bloomsbury

Joseph Darlington on Twitter

International Anthony Burgess Foundation

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In this episode, we’re discussing the bawdy, gluttonous and flatulent Falstaff by Robert Nye, with writer and academic, Rob Spence.

Falstaff is a masterpiece of obscene excess. Telling the story of the medieval knight Sir John Fastolf, reportedly the model for Shakespeare’s famous rake Falstaff, Nye’s novel is split into 100 chapters, and goes from Fastolf’s conception on the penis of the Cerne Abbas Giant to his death at the age of 81. It’s a novel Burgess calls Rabelaisian, saying it is a ‘bold venture and an indication of what the novel can do when it frees itself from the constraints of the Jamesian tradition.’

Robert Nye was an award-winning poet, novelist and critic, whose work was often inspired by his deep knowledge and love of literature. As a novelist, his work includes novels about Merlin, Faust, Lord Byron, and the companion-in-arms of Joan of Arc, Gilles de Rais. Born in London, he settled in Cork, Ireland, where he died in 2016.

Rob Spence is a retired academic. He has published on a range of modern and contemporary authors, including Anthony Burgess, Robert Nye, Ford Madox Ford, Louis de Bernieres, Wyndham Lewis and Penelope Fitzgerald.

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BOOKS MENTIONED IN THIS EPISODE

By Robert Nye:

Beowulf: A New Telling (1968)

Merlin (1978)

Faust (1980)

The Memoirs of Lord Byron (1989)

The Life and Death of My Lord Gilles de Rais (1990)

By others:

Doctor Faustus by Christopher Marlowe (c. 1592)

Henry IV (Parts One and Two) by William Shakespeare (c. 1597-99)

Henry V by William Shakespeare (c. 1599)

The Merry Wives of Windsor by William Shakespeare (1602)

The Tempest by William Shakespeare (c. 1610)

Tom Jones by Henry Fielding (1749)

The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman by Laurence Sterne (1759-67)

Hangover Square by Patrick Hamilton (1941)

The Great Tradition by F.R. Leavis (1948)

The Sot-Weed Factor by John Barth (1960)

Nothing Like the Sun by Anthony Burgess (1964)

Beyond the Words: Eleven Writers in Search of a New Fiction, ed. by Giles Gordon (1975)

A Long Trip to Tea Time by Anthony Burgess (1976)

Earthly Powers by Anthony Burgess (1980)

Midnight's Children by Salman Rushdie (1981)

A Dead Man in Deptford by Anthony Burgess (1993)

Mason & Dixon by Thomas Pynchon (1997)

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LINKS

Rob Spence Online

Guardian obituary of Robert Nye

International Anthony Burgess Foundation

The theme music is Anthony Burgess’s Concerto for Flute, Strings and Piano in D Minor, and is performed by No Dice Collective.

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In this episode, Andrew Biswell explores Christopher Isherwood’s 1964 novel A Single Man. Guiding him through the novel is Isherwood's authorised biographer and editor of his letters and diaries, Katherine Bucknell.

A Single Man tells the story of George, an English professor living in suburban Los Angeles and grieving the death of his lover, Jim. Set over one day, the novel is a deeply moving study of grief and a sensitive portrait of the aftermath of a committed gay relationship, published at a time when notions such as same-sex marriage were controversial and prohibited by law.

Christopher Isherwood was born near Stockport, England, in 1904. In 1929, he travelled to Berlin with W.H. Auden, which provided material for a sequence of novels, most notably Goodbye to Berlin, which was the basis for the hit musical Cabaret. Isherwood emigrated to the United States in 1939, first to New York with Auden, and then to California. In 1953, he met Don Bachardy and they formed a lifelong relationship. Isherwood died in 1986.

Katherine Bucknell is a biographer, editor and novelist. She has edited three volumes of Isherwood’s diaries, and The Animals, a volume of letters between Isherwood and Bachardy, which is also the basis of a podcast hosted by Katherine. Her novels include Leninsky Prospekt, Canarino, What You Will, and +1. She is the founder of the W.H. Auden Society and the director of the Christopher Isherwood Foundation. She is currently working on a major new biography of Christopher Isherwood.

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BOOKS MENTIONED IN THIS EPISODE

By Christopher Isherwood:

Goodbye to Berlin (1939)

Prater Violet (1945)

Down There on a Visit (1962)

A Meeting by the River (1967)

Christopher and His Kind (1976)

By others:

Bhagavad Vita (c. 200 BCE)

The Brothers Karamazov by Fyodor Dostoevsky (1879-80)

Father Sergius by Leo Tolstoy (1911)

Ulysses by James Joyce (1922)

Mrs Dalloway by Virginia Woolf (1925)

The Razor's Edge by Somerset Maugham (1944)

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LINKS

Christopher Isherwood: Diaries, Volume One: 1939-1960 (edited by Katherine Bucknell) at Blackwells (affiliate link)

The Animals: Love Letters Between Christopher Isherwood and Don Bachardy (edited by Katherine Bucknell) at Blackwells (affiliate link)

Katherine Bucknell's Website

The Christopher Isherwood Foundation

International Anthony Burgess Foundation

The theme music is Anthony Burgess’s Concerto for Flute, Strings and Piano in D Minor, and is performed by No Dice Collective

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

In this episode, we’re donning our snap-brim fedoras and trench-coats to investigate The Long Good-bye by Raymond Chandler with our special guest biographer Tom Williams.

The Long Good-bye is Raymond Chandler’s sixth novel, and features the further adventures of his most famous creation, private detective Philip Marlowe. After being contacted by his friend, Terry Lennox, Marlowe finds himself embroiled in the aftermath of the murder of Lennox’s wife, Sylvia. Seemingly an open-and-shut case, the mystery surrounding her death grows, and Marlowe traverses Los Angeles in search of answers from a range of oddballs and criminals.

Raymond Chandler was born in Chicago in 1888 and grew up in Ireland and London. He worked as a civil servant and a journalist in London. In 1912 he returned to America. He introduced the world to Philip Marlowe in his 1939 novel The Big Sleep, and six further novels. He died in 1959.

Tom Williams is a biographer and writer. He was born in Newcastle and read English at University College in London. He has worked in publishing and publishing technology and, in 2012, wrote A Mysterious Something in the Light: A Biography of Raymond Chandler. He currently lives in Washington DC.

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BOOKS MENTIONED IN THIS EPISODE

By Raymond Chandler:

The Big Sleep (1939)

Farewell My Lovely (1940)

Playback (1958)

Poodle Springs (with Robert B. Parker, 1989)

Philip Marlowe Novels:

The Black-Eyed Blonde by Benjamin Black/John Banville (2014)

Only to Sleep by Lawrence Osborne (2018)

The Goodbye Coast by Joe Ide (2022)

By others:

The Perry Mason Series by Erle Stanley Gardner (1933-73)

Finnegans Wake by James Joyce (1939)

The Heat of the Day by Elizabeth Bowen (1949)

Catch-22 by Joseph Heller (1961)

Collected Poems by TS Elliot (1963)

Cocksure by Mordecai Richler (1968)

Bomber by Len Deighton (1970)

Midnight's Children by Salman Rushdie (1981)

The Inspector Rebus Series by Ian Rankin (1987-2022)

Black and Blue by Ian Rankin (1997)

Christine Falls by Benjamin Black/John Banville (2006)

The Slough House/Jackson Lamb Series by Mick Herron (2010-22)

The Cormoran Strike Series by Robert Galbraith/JK Rowling (2013-22)

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LINKS

A Mysterious Something in the Light: Raymond Chandler, A Life by Tom Williams (affiliate link)

Tom Williams on Twitter and Instagram

International Anthony Burgess Foundation

The theme music is Anthony Burgess’s Concerto for Flute, Strings and Piano in D Minor, and is performed by No Dice Collective

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

In this episode, Graham Foster discovers Malcolm Lowry’s Under the Volcano, with poet, translator, editor and literary titan, Michael Schmidt.

Under the Volcano traces Geoffrey Firmin’s last day. It's set on the Day of the Dead festival in 1938, during which Firmin is visited by his wife and his brother, who offer the possibility of salvation from his alcoholic decline. As the trio spend the day together, their uneasy alliance is threatened by Firmin’s drinking, his suspicions, and his desire to vanish into the Mexican countryside. As events unfold it quickly becomes apparent that Firmin has no interest in saving himself.

Malcolm Lowry was born on the Wirral in 1909. At eighteen, he left home to work at sea, which inspired his novel Ultramarine (1933). After gaining a degree from Cambridge and after the breakdown of his first marriage, he crossed the Atlantic and explored the United States, Mexico and Canada. He died in 1957.

Michael Schmidt is a poet, literary historian, translator and editor. His most recent book of poems, Talking to Stanley on the Telephone, appeared in 2021. His major critical undertakings include Lives of the Poets (1999), The First Poets: Lives of the Ancient Greek poets (2005), The Novel: a Biography (2014) and Gilgamesh: the Life of a Poem (2019). Michael is founder, editor, and managing director of Carcanet Press and general editor of PN Review. He is currently a Professor of Poetry at the University of Manchester.

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BOOKS MENTIONED IN THIS EPISODE

By Malcolm Lowry:

Selected Poems of Malcolm Lowry (1962)

By others:

The Divine Comedy by Dante Alighieri (c. 1321)

Grace Abounding to the Chief of Sinners by John Bunyan (1606)

Gargantua and Pantagruel by François Rabelais (trans. by Thomas Urquhart, 1653)

Moby-Dick by Herman Melville (1851)

Three Lives by Gertrude Stein (1909)

'The Dead' in Dubliners by James Joyce (1914)

Ulysses by James Joyce (1922)

Mrs Dalloway by Virginia Woolf (1925)

The Plumed Serpent by D.H. Lawrence (1926)

Finnegans Wake by James Joyce (1939)

The Power and the Glory by Graham Greene (1940)

Family Sayings by Natalia Ginzburg (1963)

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LINKS

Talking to Stanley on the Telephone by Michael Schmidt (affiliate link)

The Novel: A Biography by Michael Schmidt (affiliate link)

Carcanet Press

PN Review

International Anthony Burgess Foundation

The theme music is Anthony Burgess’s Concerto for Flute, Strings and Piano in D Minor, and is performed by No Dice Collective

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

In this episode, Andrew Biswell heads back to the era of the Bright Young Things to examine Evelyn Waugh’s Brideshead Revisited with writer, academic and editor Barbara Cooke.

Brideshead Revisited is perhaps Evelyn Waugh’s most famous novel. It follows Ryder as he remembers his life, from his undergraduate years at the University of Oxford in the golden age before the Second World War, to his wartime enlistment in the army. His life is coloured by his obsession with the Flytes, an aristocratic Catholic family who live in the stately home of Brideshead. In Ninety-Nine Novels, Burgess writes, ‘I have read Brideshead Revisited at least a dozen times and have never failed to be charmed and moved, even to tears.’

Evelyn Waugh was born in 1903. At the age of 24, he published his first book, a biography of the artist Dante Gabriel Rossetti, and the following year he published his first novel, Decline and Fall. Sixteen more novels followed, including A Handful of Dust, Scoop and Vile Bodies. His last novels were the Sword of Honour trilogy, which were published in 1965. He died in 1966.

Barbara Cooke is a Senior Lecturer in English at Loughborough University. She is also Co-Executive Editor of the Complete Works of Evelyn Waugh, published by Oxford University Press, a series which brings together all of Waugh’s published and previously unpublished writing with comprehensive introductions, contextual writing and annotations. She is the author of Evelyn Waugh’s Oxford, published by The Bodleian Library, and has recently written the introduction to Penguin’s new edition of Decline and Fall.

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BOOKS MENTIONED IN THIS EPISODE

By Evelyn Waugh:

Decline and Fall (1928)

Vile Bodies (1930)

A Handful of Dust (1934)

Helena (1950)

The Ordeal of Gilbert Pinfold (1957)

A Little Learning (1957)

By others:

Alice's Adventures in Wonderland by Lewis Carroll (1865)

Gaudy Night by Dorothy L. Sayers (1935)

I Capture the Castle by Dodie Smith (1948)

Crooked House by Agatha Christie (1949)

A Grain of Wheat by Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o (1967)

Ruling Passions by Tom Driberg (1977)

Evelyn Waugh (Two Volumes: The Early Years 1903-1939 and The Later Years 1939-1966) by Martin Stannard (1989-94)

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LINKS

Evelyn Waugh's Oxford by Barbara Cooke (affiliate link)

The Complete Works of Evelyn Waugh at Oxford University Press

International Anthony Burgess Foundation

The theme music is Anthony Burgess’s Concerto for Flute, Strings and Piano in D Minor, and is performed by No Dice Collective.

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In its capacity as an educational charity, the Burgess Foundation offers grants to researchers and scholars with an interest in the life and work of Anthony Burgess and other connected subjects such as twentieth century literature and musical composition. The Liana Burgess Fellowship helps international researchers to visit the archives at the Burgess Foundation. It is named after Burgess’s wife, who set up the Foundation in 2003 and was instrumental in preserving his personal papers and possessions, all of which is available to researchers at our facilities in Manchester.

Dr Mária Palla is an assistant professor in the Institute of English and America Studies at Pázmány Péter Catholic University in Budapest, Hungary. Her research focuses on contemporary literatures in English, which she examines using the tools of post-colonial criticism. She has published widely on Canadian literature, focussing on representations of the diasporic experiences of immigrants to the country. She is currently working on Anthony Burgess’s Malayan novels.

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LINKS:

Mária Palla at Pázmány Péter Catholic University

International Anthony Burgess Foundation

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In its capacity as an educational charity, the Burgess Foundation offers grants to researchers and scholars with an interest in the life and work of Anthony Burgess and other connected subjects such as twentieth century literature and musical composition. The Liana Burgess Fellowship helps international researchers to visit the archives at the Burgess Foundation. It is named after Burgess’s wife, who set up the Foundation in 2003 and was instrumental in preserving his personal papers and possessions, all of which is available to researchers at our facilities in Manchester.

Dr Ákos Farkas is Associate Professor of English at Eötvös Loránd University in Budapest, Hungary. His research interests lie in twentieth century English, American and Irish literature, in particular, the Catholic novel, modernism and the postmodern and utopian and dystopian literature. As a translator and editor, he has helped bring Burgess’s Enderby sequence into Hungarian, and has translated the works of authors such as Cecilia Ahern, Geroge McDonald Fraser, Tibor Fischer and George Orwell. He is also the volume editor for the Irwell Edition of Anthony Burgess’s The Clockwork Testament, available now from Manchester University Press.

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LINKS:

Ákos Farkas at Eötvös Loránd University

The Irwell Edition of the Works of Anthony Burgess at Manchester University Press

International Anthony Burgess Foundation

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Burgess first visited America in 1966, when he was 49, but over the course of his career he gained extensive experience of both living and working in the United States. These experiences influenced some of his most important work, including Earthly Powers, and he analysed American culture extensively in his journalism and non-fiction.

Christopher W Thurley is an English faculty member at Gaston College in Dallas, North Carolina. He earned his doctorate, which focussed on the life and work of Anthony Burgess, from Manchester Metropolitan University. His monograph, Anthony Burgess and America, is forthcoming from Manchester University Press.

Click here for more information about Anthony Burgess and to find out how you can support the work of the Burgess Foundation.

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Chatsky tells the story of a young Russian diplomat who returns from a foreign posting to Moscow, where he hopes to rekindle his love affair with his childhood sweetheart ,Sophie, but she is being pursued by Molchalin, and the Moscow elite have grown suspicious of Chatsky's worldly intelligence. Burgess's exuberant translation maintains the original's rhyming form, but, like his earlier translation of Cyrano de Bergerac, the wordy and witty results are quintessentially Burgessian.

To shed light on the play, Andrew Biswell speaks to Anna Aslanyan, expert in Russian literature, about Griboyedov's original, and how Burgess's translation captures its essence. He also chats to Jonathan Cullen, who played Molchalin in the original production of Chatsky at the Almeida, London, in March 1993. Here's more about our guests in this episode:

Anna Aslanyan is a journalist, translator and public service interpreter. As a journalist she has contributed to the Times Literary Supplement, the Guardian and other UK publications, writing about books and arts. Her translations from Russian include contemporary short stories for Dalkey Archive’s collection Best European Fiction and Egor Kovalevsky’s 19th century travelogue A Journey to Africa. Her popular history of translation Dancing on Ropes: Translators and the Balance of History is out now.

Jonathan Cullen has been an actor for stage and screen for nearly 40 years. On stage, he has performed lead roles with the National Theatre, the Royal Shakespeare Company and on the West End as well as renowned theatres around the UK. He has appeared in films such as Velvet Goldmine, Finding Neverland and Suffragette, and on television he played King George VI in the BBC’s adaptation of Len Deighton’s SS-GB, and the Archbishop of Canterbury in the Channel 4 comedy The Windsors. He is currently based in Portland, Oregon.

Extracts from Chatsky are read by Paul Barnhill who is an actor, puppeteer and the creative director of the theatre company Goofus.

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LINKS

Two Plays: Chatsky and Miser, Miser by Anthony Burgess at Salamander Street

Dancing on Ropes: Translators and the Balance of History by Anna Aslanyan at Blackwells (affiliate link)

Jonathan Cullen's Website

Goofus Theatre Company

International Anthony Burgess Foundation

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Andy Spinoza moved from London to Manchester at the age of eighteen and has remained in the city ever since. He wrote about the city’s music scene for the NME and The Face and he founded the alternative magazine City Life in 1983, which charted the city’s cultural life for over twenty years, and helped launch the careers of Mark Kermode, Jon Ronson and Melvin Burgess among others. Andy also worked as a gossip columnist for Manchester Evening News for ten years, during which time he met Anthony Burgess several times.

LINKS:

Manchester Unspun by Andy Spinoza at Manchester University Press

Andy Spinoza on Twitter

International Anthony Burgess Foundation

If you have enjoyed this episode, why not leave us a review and subscribe wherever you get your podcasts.

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In this episode, Andrew Biswell talks to the poet Peter Bakowski about his virtual residency at the Burgess Foundation and the poems inspired by his research into Anthony Burgess.

Peter Bakowski is our first Virtual Writer in Residence and joined us through a collaborative project with Manchester UNESCO City of Literature. Peter is an award-winning Australian poet, whose work has an international influence. Having travelled widely in Europe, North America, Africa and Asia, his work has been set in many countries around the world, and been published in languages such as Arabic, Japanese, Bengali and Mandarin. 2022 marks his 40th year of writing poetry.

Peter’s latest collection of poetry are Our Ways on Earth, published by Recent Work Press, and Nearly Lunch, published by Wakefield Press and written in collaboration with the Adelaide poet Ken Bolton.

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LINKS:

Our Ways on Earth by Peter Bakowski

Nearly Lunch by Peter Bakowski and Ken Bolton

Manchester UNESCO City of Literature

International Anthony Burgess Foundation

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The Irwell Edition of the Works of Anthony Burgess is one of the central projects of the Burgess Foundation, and aims to publish each of Burgess’s novels and major works of non-fiction in critical editions edited by experts and scholars. Each edition has a new introduction, a text which has been restored to that of the first edition, appendices drawn from the Burgess Archives around the world, and expansive notes on the text. Mozart and the Wolf Gang is a strange novella. It was written to commemorate the bicentenary of Mozart, and combines fiction, opera libretto, and fragments of film script among other things which work together to be a deliberation on the nature of music.

The Irwell Edition of Mozart and the Wolf Gang was edited by Alan Shockley, and was one of his final projects before he died in 2020. Alan was Professor of Music at California State University, Long Beach, and as a composer, he thoughtful and challenging work was admired by audiences all over the world.

Mozart and the Wolf Gang is out now!

Find out more about the Irwell Edition of the Works of Anthony Burgess at Manchester University Press.

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LINKS:

A Memorial for Alan Shockley at California State University, Long Beach

Music in the Words: Musical Form and Counterpoint in the Twentieth Century Novel by Alan Shockley

Gender, Power and Identity in the Films of Stanley Kubrick [containing 'Music and Misogyny in A Clockwork Orange' by Christine Lee Gengaro]

Anthony Burgess, Stanley Kubrick and A Clockwork Orange [containing 'Transforming Variations: Music in the Novel, Film, and Play, A Clockwork Orange' by Christine Lee Gengaro]

International Anthony Burgess Foundation

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This is the final episode of Series Two, and our guest Elizabeth Elliott is helping us explore Camelot in The Once and Future King by T.H. White. Published in 1958, The Once and Future King adapts the famous stories of King Arthur and his Round Table. Beginning with the childhood of Arthur in the first book, The Sword in the Stone, White’s version of the familiar stories are complex examinations of leadership, nobility, romance and war. Of White’s novel, Burgess writes, ‘This is not remote and fabulous history: the lesson of the breaking of the Round Table is for our time.’

T.H. White was born in Bombay, India in 1906. Although The Once and Future King is his most famous novel, he was a prolific writer, with 20 other books to his name. In 1951, he published The Goshawk, which details his attempts to train his hawk using the falconry methods of the Middle Ages. He died in 1964 in Greece, during the return journey from a lecture tour of the United States.

Elizabeth Elliott is Senior Lecturer in English Literature at the University of Aberdeen. She specialises in medieval and early modern literature and the afterlives of medieval texts in later literature. Her latest article ‘Restorying Arthurian Legend: Space, Place and Time in Once & Future and Legendborn’ was published in the Journal of the International Arthurian Society in 2022. Her book Remembering Boethius: Writing Aristocratic Identity in Later Medieval French and English Literatures is published by Routledge.

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BOOKS MENTIONED IN THIS EPISODE

The Arthurian Romances by Chrétien de Troyes (c. 1170-90)

The Prose Lancelot by Anonymous, including the Queste del Saint Graal (c. 1210-1235)

Sir Gawain and the Green Knight by Anonymous (c. 1400)

Le Morte D'Arthur by Thomas Malory (1485)

A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court by Mark Twain (1889)

The Harry Potter Series (1997-2007)

The Magicians by Lev Grossman (2009)

H is for Hawk by Helen MacDonald (2014)

Freshwater by Akwaeke Emezi (2018)

Once & Future by A.R. Capetta and Cory McCarthy (2019)

Legendborn by Tracy Deonn (2020)

Sword, Stone, Table ed. by Swapna Krishna and Jenny Northington (2021)

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LINKS

Elizabeth Elliott at the University of Aberdeen

Elizabeth Elliott on Twitter

International Anthony Burgess Foundation

The theme music is Anthony Burgess’s Concerto for Flute, Strings and Piano in D Minor, and is performed by No Dice Collective. 

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In this episode, the Burgess Foundation's Graham Foster is joined by writer and academic Tim Kendall to talk about The Spire by William Golding. Published in 1964, The Spire tells the story of Jocelin, the dean of a medieval cathedral. He believes he has been tasked by God to build the tallest spire in England, but its construction is plagued by problems, just as Jocelin is plagued by visions both heavenly and otherwise.

William Golding was born in Cornwall in 1911. After becoming a schoolteacher in Salisbury in the 1930s, he was drafted into the Royal Navy for his wartime service, during which he participated in the Normandy Landings on D-Day. He began writing in the 1950s, and published his first novel Lord of the Flies in 1954. He won the Booker Prize in 1980 for Rites of Passage, beating Anthony Burgess’s Earthly Powers. He died in 1993 aged 81.

Tim Kendall is Professor of English at the University of Exeter. He is currently preparing the correspondence between William Golding and his editor Charles Monteith for publication by Faber & Faber. His next book, co-authored with Fiona Mathews, is Black Ops and Beaver-Bombing, an exploration of Britain’s wild mammals and is forthcoming from Oneworld in spring 2023.

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BOOKS MENTIONED IN THIS EPISODE

By William Golding:

Lord of the Flies (1954)

The Inheritors (1955)

Pincher Martin (1956)

Free Fall (1959)

To the Ends of the Earth, consisting of: Rites of Passage (1980); Close Quarters (1987); Fire Down Below (1989)

By others:

The Coral Island by R.M. Ballantyne (1857)

The Master Builder by Henrik Ibsen (1892)

'The Eye of Allah' in Debits and Credits by Rudyard Kipling (1926)

Tom's Midnight Garden by Philippa Pearce (1958)

A Clockwork Orange by Anthony Burgess (1962)

Riddley Walker by Russell Hoban (1980)

Midnight's Children by Salman Rushdie (1981)

Northern Lights by Philip Pullman (1995)

Piranesi by Susanna Clarke (2020)

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LINKS

Black Ops and Beaver-Bombing by Tim Kendall and Fiona Mathews (Pre-Order)

Official William Golding Website

The relationship between William Golding and Susanna Clarke by Arabella Currie

International Anthony Burgess Foundation

The theme music is Anthony Burgess’s Concerto for Flute, Strings and Piano in D Minor, and is performed by No Dice Collective.

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Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

In this episode, Andrew Biswell of the Burgess Foundation talks to biographer Mary V Dearborn about two novels by Ernest Hemingway: For Whom the Bell Tolls and The Old Man and the Sea.

Published in 1940, For Whom the Bell Tolls is Hemingway’s fictional examination of the Spanish Civil War. The story deals with an American who joins a group of anti-fascist guerrillas in Spain and plots to destroy a bridge to stop the advance of the enemy. The Old Man and the Sea was the last major work of fiction published in Hemingway’s life. It arrived in 1952, and tells the story of an old Cuban fisherman who chases down a great marlin and struggles to bring it in to shore.

Ernest Hemingway was born in Illinois in 1899. He is widely regarded as one of the greatest American authors of the twentieth century. His debut novel The Sun Also Rises was published in 1926 and he went on to publish five more in his lifetime, along with six volumes of short stories and two books of non-fiction. There have been several posthumous publications. Hemingway died by suicide in 1961.

Mary V Dearborn is a biographer and has written books on subjects such as Peggy Guggenheim, Norman Mailer, Louise Bryant and Henry Miller. Her biography of Ernest Hemingway was published in 2017.

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BOOKS MENTIONED IN THIS PODCAST

By Ernest Hemingway:

The Sun Also Rises (1926)

A Farewell to Arms (1929)

Death in the Afternoon (1932)

The Green Hills of Africa (1935)

Across the River and into the Trees (1950)

A Moveable Feast (1964)

Islands in the Stream (1970)

The Garden of Eden (1986)

The Complete Short Stories of Ernest Hemingway (1987)

By others:

The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald (1925)

Tender is the Night by F. Scott Fitzgerald (1934)

Papa Hemingway by AE Hotchner (1966)

Ernest Hemingway: A Life Story by Carlos Baker (1969)

A Reader's Guide to Ernest Hemingway by Arthur Waldhorn (1975)

Ernest Hemingway and His World by Anthony Burgess (1978)

The Paris Wife by Paula McLain (2011)

Mrs Hemingway by Naomi Wood (2014)

The Letters of Ernest Hemingway Vols I-V (2011-2020, ongoing)

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LINKS

Mary V Dearborn's website

Ernest Hemingway: A Biography by Mary V Dearborn

International Anthony Burgess Foundation

The theme music is Anthony Burgess’s Concerto for Flute, Strings and Piano in D Minor, and is performed by No Dice Collective.

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In this episode, Will Carr of the Burgess Foundation talks to Rob Mallows, creator of the Deighton Dossier website, about Len Deighton’s Bomber, which follows the disparate characters caught up in an Allied bombing raid on Western Germany during World War II. Published in 1970, the story is told from many different points of view, including both British and German flight crews, and follows the assault, from its preparations to its ultimately tragic conclusion.

Len Deighton was born in 1929, and is perhaps most famous for his novel The IPCRESS File, which was turned into a film starring Micheal Caine in 1965. He is still writing at the age of 93.

Rob Mallows is the creator and curator of the Deighton Dossier, the internet’s only comprehensive resource about the life and works of Len Deighton.

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BOOKS MENTIONED IN THIS EPISODE

By Len Deighton:

The IPCRESS File (1962)

Funeral in Berlin (1964)

London Dossier (1967)

Fighter: The True Story of the Battle of Britain (1977)

SS-GB (1978)

Berlin Game (1983)

Mexico Set (1984)

London Match (1985)

By others:

The Kindly Ones by Jonathan Littell (2006)

Track Changes: A Literary History of Word Processing by Matthew G. Kirschenbaum (2016)

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LINKS

The Deighton Dossier

The Deighton Dossier Blog

The Deighton Dossier Facebook Group

The Deighton Dossier on Twitter

International Anthony Burgess Foundation

The theme music is Anthony Burgess's Concerto for Flute, Strings and Piano in D Minor. It is performed by No Dice Collective.

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You can join the conversation and tell us which 100th book you would add to Burgess's list by using the hashtag #99Novels on Twitter.

If you have enjoyed this episode, why not leave us a review and subscribe wherever you get your podcasts.

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

In this episode, Andrew Biswell of the Burgess Foundation speaks to writer and editor Alan Taylor about two novels by Muriel Spark: The Girls of Slender Means and The Mandelbaum Gate.

Born in 1918, Muriel Spark was a novelist, poet, essayist and biographer. Her novels are celebrated as pioneering works of postmodernism and she was twice shortlisted for the Booker Prize. She is best known for The Prime of Miss Jean Brody, which was adapted for the screen in 1969. She lived in Edinburgh, Southern Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe), New York, Rome, and latterly in Tuscany, where she died in 2006.

Alan Taylor is the author of Appointment in Arezzo: A Friendship with Muriel Spark. In 2018, he was the series editor of Spark’s Collected Novels, published by Polygon to celebrate her centenary. He was the founding editor of the Scottish Review of Books and the Managing Editor of the Scotsman. He is a long-standing member of the Scottish team on BBC Radio 4’s Round Britain Quiz. Madly, Deeply: The Diaries of Alan Rickman, edited by Alan Taylor, is out now.

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BOOKS MENTIONED IN THIS EPISODE

By Muriel Spark:

The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie (1961)

Loitering with Intent (1981)

By others:

Macbeth by William Shakespeare (1606)

The Ballad of Sir Patrick Spens (Anonymous, 1765)

War and Peace by Leo Tolstoy (1867)

The Wreck of the Deutschland by Gerard Manley Hopkins (1918)

Brideshead Revisited by Evelyn Waugh (1945)

The End of the Affair by Graham Greene (1951)

Tremor of Intent by Anthony Burgess (1966)

The Clockwork Testament by Anthony Burgess (1974)

Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy by John Le Carré (1974)

A Perfect Spy by John Le Carré (1986)

Muriel Spark: The Biography by Martin Stannard (2009)

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LINKS

Madly, Deeply: The Diaries of Alan Rickman edited by Alan Taylor (Canongate)

The Complete Muriel Spark at Polygon

Appointment in Arezzo: A Friendship with Muriel Spark by Alan Taylor (Polygon)

The Assassin's Cloak: An Anthology of the World's Best Diarists, edited by Irene and Alan Taylor (Canongate)

International Anthony Burgess Foundation

The theme music is Anthony Burgess's Concerto for Flute, Strings and Piano in D Minor. It is performed by No Dice Collective.

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If you have enjoyed this episode, why not leave us a review and subscribe wherever you get your podcasts.

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

In this episode, we’re heading to an alternate universe as writer, academic and curator Glyn Morgan guides the Burgess Foundation's Graham Foster through Pavane by Keith Roberts.

Published in 1968, Pavane is set in a Great Britain ruled by the Catholic Church after the assassination of Elizabeth I. The story picks up in the twentieth century, and follows a disparate group of characters as they navigate a world on the cusp of rebellion. Burgess lauds the depiction of a ‘modern England that is also medieval’ and calls the novel ‘a striking work of the imagination’.

Keith Roberts was born in Kettering in 1935. He wrote thirteen novels, including The Furies, The Chalk Giants and Molly Zero. He was also an illustrator and worked on the artwork for New Worlds and Impulse magazines. He died in 2000 at the age of 65.

Glyn Morgan is a writer, academic and curator based in London. He is the author of Imagining the Unimaginable: Speculative Fiction and the Holocaust (Bloomsbury) and curator of the forthcoming blockbuster immersive exhibition Science Fiction: Voyage to the Edge of Imagination, which opens at the Science Museum in London on 6 October 2022 and runs until 4 May 2023. Glyn has also edited a new volume of essays, interviews and 200 colour illustrations to accompany the exhibition (Thames and Hudson).

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BOOKS MENTIONED IN THIS EPISODE

By Keith Roberts:

The Chalk Giants (1974)

By others:

The History of the Universal Monarchy: Napoleon and the Conquest of the World by Louis Geoffroy (1836)

Lest Darkness Fall by L. Sprague de Camp (1939)

Nineteen Eighty-Four by George Orwell (1949)

Bring the Jubilee by Ward Moore (1953)

A Canticle for Leibowitz by Walter M. Miller Jr (1959)

A Clockwork Orange by Anthony Burgess (1962)

The Man in the High Castle by Philip K. Dick (1962)

The Alteration by Kinglsey Amis (1976)

Riddley Walker by Russell Hoban (1980)

Neuromancer by William Gibson (1984)

The Sparrow by Mary Doria Russell (1996)

The Loney by Andrew Micheal Hurley (2014)

A Man Lies Dreaming by Lavie Tidhar (2014)

Science Fiction and Catholicism: The Rise and Fall of the Robot Papacy by Jim Clarke (2019)

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LINKS

Imagining the Unimaginable: Speculative Fiction and the Holocaust by Glyn Morgan

Science Fiction: Voyage to the Edge of Imagination at the Science Museum, London

International Anthony Burgess Foundation

The theme music is Anthony Burgess’s Concerto for Flute, Strings and Piano in D Minor, and is performed by No Dice Collective.

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If you have enjoyed this episode, why not leave us a review and subscribe wherever you get your podcasts.

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

In this episode, the Burgess Foundation's Graham Foster learns about Elizabeth Bowen’s The Heat of the Day with writer and academic Jessica Gildersleeve.

Published in 1949, The Heat of the Day tells the story of Stella Rodney, a divorcee living in London in the dying days of the Blitz. When she is informed by a mysterious man called Harrison that her partner Robert is selling state secrets to the Nazis, she is cast in the role of unwilling spy.

Elizabeth Bowen was born in Dublin in 1899. She began her career as a writer in 1923 with Encounters, a book of short stories. Her novels include The Last September, The House in Paris and The Death of the Heart. During the war, she worked at the Ministry of Information, reporting on the opinions of Irish citizens about their nation’s neutrality. She died in 1973.

Jessica Gildersleeve is Associate Professor of English Literature at the University of Southern Queensland. Her books include two on Elizabeth Bowen: Elizabeth Bowen and the Writing of Trauma: The Ethics of Survivaland Elizabeth Bowen: Theory, Thought, and Things. Her other work on women’s wartime writing in Britain and in Australia includes studies of Rosamond Lehmann, Rose Macaulay, Virginia Woolf, Jean Rhys, and Eleanor Dark. Her latest book is Screening the Gothic in Australia and New Zealand: Contemporary Antipodean Film and Television, is out now from Amsterdam University Press.

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BOOKS MENTIONED IN THIS EPISODE

By Elizabeth Bowen:

To the North (1932)

The Death of the Heart (1938)

Bowen's Court (1942)

Seven Winters: Memories of a Dublin Childhood (1942)

The Demon Lover and Other Stories (1945)

'Notes on Writing a Novel' in Collected impressions (1950)

By others:

And Then There Were None by Agatha Christie (1939)

The Naked and the Dead by Norman Mailer (1948)

Wide Sargasso Sea by Jean Rhys (1966)

The Shining by Stephen King (1977)

Loaded by Christos Tsiolkas (1995)

The Night Watch by Sarah Waters (2006)

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LINKS

Elizabeth Bowen: Theory, Thought, Things, ed by Jessica Gildersleeve and Patricia Juliana Smith (Edinburgh University Press)

Elizabeth Bowen and the Writing of Trauma: The Ethics of Survival by Jessica Gildersleeve (Brill)

Screening the Gothic in Australia and New Zealand: Contemporary Antipodean Film and Television, ed by Jessica Gildersleeve and Kate Cantrell (Amsterdam University Press)

International Anthony Burgess Foundation

The theme music is Anthony Burgess’s Concerto for Flute, Strings and Piano in D Minor, and is performed by No Dice Collective.

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Why not leave us a review and subscribe wherever you get your podcasts.

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

In this episode writer and academic John Bowen guides Andrew Biswell of the Burgess Foundation through Nineteen-Eighty Four by George Orwell.

Published in 1949, Nineteen-Eighty Four is one of the most revered pieces of dystopian fiction ever written. Telling the story of Winston Smith, an office drone who works for the Ministry of Truth, Orwell’s novel creates a terrifying vision of a totalitarian Britain.

George Orwell was born as Eric Blair in 1903 in India. He is renowned for his political writing in the non-fiction books The Road to Wigan Pier and Down and Out in Paris and London. His novels include Animal Farm, Burmese Days and Keep the Aspidistra Flying. He died in 1950. 

John Bowen is Professor of Nineteenth-Century Literature at the University of York. He is the author of Other Dickens: Pickwick to Chuzzlewit and has edited Anthony Trollope’s Barchester Towers and Phineas Redux for Oxford World’s Classics. He has contributed to a number of television documentaries and radio programmes, including BBC Radio 4's In Our Time, Front Row, Open Book, and Woman's Hour, Channel 4’s Dickens’s Secret Lover and BBC2’s Being the Brontes.

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BOOKS MENTIONED IN THIS EPISODE

By George Orwell:

Burmese Days (1934)

A Clergyman's Daughter (1935)

Coming Up for Air (1939)

Animal Farm (1945)

By others:

Frankenstein by Mary Shelley (1818)

Nicholas Nickleby by Charles Dickens (1839)

A Christmas Carol by Charles Dickens (1843)

We by Yevgeny Zamyatin (1924)

Brave New World by Aldous Huxley (1932)

Darkness at Noon by Arthur Koestler (1940)

Molloy by Samuel Beckett (1951)

Malone Dies by Samuel Beckett (1951)

The Unnameable by Samuel Beckett (1953)

A Clockwork Orange by Anthony Burgess (1962)

Wide Sargasso Sea by Jean Rhys (1966)

Troubles by J.G. Farrell (1970)

G by John Berger (1972)

The Siege of Krishnapur by J.G. Farrell (1973)

Slow Days, Fast Company by Eve Babitz (1977)

Offshore by Penelope Fitzgerald (1979)

Good Behaviour by Molly Keane (1981)

The Life and Times of Micheal K by J.M. Coetzee (1983)

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LINKS

Nineteen Eighty-Four by George Orwell (edited by John Bowen) at Oxford University Press

'Charles Dickens' by George Orwell at The Orwell Foundation

International Anthony Burgess Foundation

The theme music is Anthony Burgess’s Concerto for Flute, Strings and Piano in D Minor, and is performed by No Dice Collective.

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If you have enjoyed this episode, don’t forget to leave us a review and subscribe wherever you get your podcasts.

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

In this episode writer and academic David Ian Paddy guides the Burgess Foundation's Will Carr through the strange world of The Unlimited Dream Company by J.G. Ballard.

Published in 1979, the novel begins with a man named Blake crashing a plane into the River Thames outside of Ballard’s hometown, the suburb of Shepperton. He soon finds he cannot leave the suburb, and manifests a series of extraordinary powers. But is his elevation to a kind of messiah reality, or did he really die in the plane crash?

J.G. Ballard was born in Shanghai, where his father worked for a textile company. After internment during the war, the Ballard family moved to Britain in 1945. He published his first book, The Wind from Nowhere in 1961. He went on to publish 18 more novels along with several volumes of short stories, essays and an autobiography. He died in 2009.

David Ian Paddy is the Albert Upton Endowed Chair in English Language and Literature at Whittier College in California. He specialises in twentieth century and contemporary British literature and has written extensively on writers such as J.G. Ballard, Angela Carter, Niall Griffiths, Jackie Kay and Jeff Noon. His book The Empires of J.G. Ballard: An Imaginitive Geography was published in 2015 by Gylphi Press.

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BOOKS MENTIONED IN THIS EPISODE

By J.G. Ballard:

The Drowned World (1962)

The Terminal Beach (1964)

The Crystal World (1966)

The Atrocity Exhibition (1970)

Crash (1973)

High Rise (1975)

Hello America (1981)

"The Intensive Care Unit" in Myths of the Near Future (1982)

Empire of the Sun (1984)

"Which Way to Inner Space?" in A User's Guide to the Millennium: Essays and Reviews (1996)

By others:

The Golden Bough by James George Frazer (1890)

Ulysses by James Joyce (1922)

Finnegans Wake by James Joyce (1939)

Foundation by Isaac Asimov (1942)

Pincher Martin by William Golding (1956)

A Clockwork Orange by Anthony Burgess (1962)

The Wanting Seed by Anthony Burgess (1962)

The Third Policeman by Flann O'Brien (1967)

Ice by Anna Kavan (1967)

MF by Anthony Burgess (1971)

Napoleon Symphony by Anthony Burgess (1974)

The End of the World News by Anthony Burgess (1982)

Nights at the Circus by Angela Carter (1984)

Puma by Anthony Burgess (2019)

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LINKS

The Empires of J.G. Ballard: An Imaginitive Geography by David Ian Paddy at Gylphi Press

International Anthony Burgess Foundation

The theme music is Anthony Burgess's Concerto for Flute, Strings and Piano in D Minor. It is performed by No Dice Collective.

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If you have enjoyed this episode, why not leave us a review and subscribe wherever you get your podcasts.

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

In this episode, the Burgess Foundation's Graham Foster talks to novelist Kim Sherwood about Goldfinger by Ian Fleming, the seventh novel in the James Bond series.

Published in 1959, it follows James Bond as he investigates the activities of the villainous Auric Goldfinger, a man obsessed with wealth and determined to steal the gold reserves of the United States. In his review in Ninety-Nine Novels, Burgess declared that Fleming's writing 'raised the standard of the popular story’, and he argued against the notion that Fleming was not a literary writer.

Ian Fleming was born in 1908, and worked as a journalist before the Second World War, during which he served in the Naval Intelligence Division, a posting which directly inspired the creation of James Bond. He wrote all of the Bond stories at his house, Goldeneye, in Jamaica, and while the spy thrillers dominated his writing career, he also wrote Chitty-Chitty Bang Bang. He died in 1964 at the age of 56.  

Kim Sherwood is a novelist and lecturer in Creative Writing at the University of Edinburgh. She published her first novel, Testament, in 2018 and was shortlisted for the Sunday Times Young Writer of the Year Award the following year. Her latest novel is Double or Nothing, the first in a new trilogy which follows a group of Double O agents as they search for a missing James Bond, is available now from HarperCollins.

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BOOKS MENTIONED IN THIS EPISODE

By Ian Fleming:

From Russia, with Love (1957)

'Risico' in For Your Eyes Only (1960)

On Her Majesty's Secret Service (1963)

Thrilling Cities (1963)

By others:

Right Ho, Jeeves by P.G. Wodehouse (1934)

Venetia by Georgette Heyer (1958)

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LINKS:

Double or Nothing by Kim Sherwood at HarperCollins

Kim Sherwood on Twitter

Kim Sherwood on Instagram

Ian Fleming Website

International Anthony Burgess Foundation

The theme music is Anthony Burgess's Concerto for Flute, Strings and Piano in D Minor. It is performed by No Dice Collective.

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You can join the conversation and tell us which 100th book you would add to Burgess's list by using the hashtag #99Novels on Twitter.

If you have enjoyed this episode, why not leave us a review and subscribe wherever you get your podcasts.

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

We begin with Anthony Burgess’s 1979 novel, Man of Nazareth, an ambitious account of Jesus’s life from the point of view of a fictional Greek merchant. The novel was written at the same time as Burgess’s teleplay Jesus of Nazareth which was filmed by Franco Zeffirelli with Robert Powell in the lead role.

Nicholas Graham also introduces his own book, The Judas Case. Retired spymaster Solomon Eliades is called back into service to investigate the death of Yehuda of Kerioth, better known as Judas Iscariot, the most able undercover agent the Temple guard ever produced.

Nicholas Graham studied creative writing at Manchester Metropolitan University. He was a member of the Sidney Sussex College Cambridge University team that won BBC2’s University Challenge – Champions Reunited series. An early draft of The Judas Case won a 2016 Northern Writers Awards New Fiction Bursary. Nicholas lives with his partner in a remote coastal village in Cumbria.

LINKS

Nicholas Graham on Twitter

The Judas Case Blog

The Judas Case by Nicholas Graham at The Book Guild

International Anthony Burgess Foundation

If you have enjoyed this episode, don’t forget to leave us a review and subscribe wherever you get your podcasts.

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Will’s book Writing in the Dark: Bloomsbury, the Blitz and Horizon Magazine, brings to life the cultural and intellectual environment that influenced some of Anthony Burgess’s most defining thoughts about writing and literature. Many of the writers that feature in this story, such as Stephen Spender, George Orwell, Dylan Thomas and Evelyn Waugh, had the development of their creative lives arrested by the war. This was the same fate as Burgess, who felt he had been exiled to a military post in Gibraltar. But all of these writers tried to make sense of the war through literature and what they produced remains some of the most important work of the twentieth century.

Will Loxley is a writer based in Sheffield. Writing in the Dark is his first book and was called ‘energetic and enthused’ by the Times. He is currently working on his second book, A Novel Idea: The Race to Master the English Novel from Daniel Defoe to Jane Austen. 

Will can be found on Twitter @WillLoxley

Writing in the Dark is published by Weidenfeld & Nicholson and is now available in paperback from your favourite place to buy books.

For more about Anthony Burgess and to find out how you can support the work of the Burgess Foundation, visit our website.

If you have enjoyed this episode, why not leave us a review and subscribe wherever you get your podcasts.

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

In this episode, Andrew Biswell of the Burgess Foundation talks to David Collard about his book Multiple Joyce, a study of Joyce’s cultural legacy over one hundred essays that often reveal unexpected connections and insights into what Joyce and his work means for modern audiences.

David Collard is a writer, reviewer, researcher, editor and broadcaster. His writing regularly appears in the Times Literary Supplement and Literary Review, and he has appeared on BBC Radio 3 and 4. His first book was About a Girl: A Readers’ Guide to Eimear McBride’s A Girl is a Half Formed Thing. He is currently working on books about WH Auden, the New Review, and a memoir of his upbringing as a reluctant Jehovah’s Witness.

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LINKS:

David Collard's website

David Collard on Twitter

Multiple Joyce by David Collard at Sagging Meniscus Press

International Anthony Burgess Foundation

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In this episode, the Burgess Foundation's Will Carr tells the story of Blooms of Dublin, Burgess's musical adaptation of Ulysses which was first performed in Dublin in 1982 to mark the centenary of Joyce's birth. The episode contains recordings of Burgess talking about how he adapted such a complex novel into a stage musical, an interview with Frank Grimes, who played Stephen Dedalus in the production, and new recordings of several of the songs from Blooms of Dublin.

The songs performed in this episode are:

'Today' – a song that celebrates Bloomsday, 16 June 1904, the day on which the novel takes place. This takes place on a Dublin street. Leopold Bloom, a baritone, sings a relaxed ballad in which he anticipates meeting someone new on this otherwise ordinary day. Owen Gilhooly sings the part of Bloom.

'Four O'Clock Tea' – Leopold Bloom’s wife is Molly Bloom, a professional soprano singer. While Bloom is out in the street, she is waking up in bed, and her song ‘Four O’Clock Tea’ anticipates meeting her lover that afternoon, Blazes Boylan. Bloom surprises her halfway through with her breakfast on a tray, and is furious to learn that Boylan will be visiting. Rachel Croash sings the part of Molly.

'Paris is a Lamp Lit for Lovers' – Stephen Dedalus, who is visiting a brothel with Bloom, describes his adventures in Paris, and the music moves from a gentle ballad to a lively cancan, and back again. The part of Stephen is sung by Philip O’Connor.

'Final Scene' – an extract from the 17-minute finale of Blooms of Dublin, sung by Molly Bloom as she reprises many of the numbers of the play and mixes them with new material in a musical recreation of Joyce's famous virtuoso monologue that ends the novel. Once again, Rachel Croash takes the part of Molly.

The piano on all of these songs is played by David Jones. The musical director is Richard Strivens and the sound engineer is Sam Gee.

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For more information on Anthony Burgess and to find out how you can support our work, visit the Burgess Foundation online.

Don't forget to leave us a review and subscribe wherever you get your podcasts.

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Find out how Burgess first discovered the work of James Joyce, how it chimed with his own experiences as a lapsed Catholic, and how he ended up visiting the ruins of Leopold Bloom's home in Dublin. You can also hear Burgess read from A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, and hear Burgess's thoughts on Joyce and Dublin in archive recordings.

This episode was written and narrated by Andrew Biswell

For more on Anthony Burgess and to find out how you can support the work of the Burgess Foundation, visit our website.

If you have enjoyed this episode, don't forget to leave us a review and subscribe wherever you get your podcasts.

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Ludger is based in Bonn, Germany, and works as a translator and literary editor. The first volume of his translation of The Malayan Trilogy, Jetzt ein Tiger, in out now from Elsinor. The second and third volumes Der Feind in der Decke and Die Betten im Orient will be published by Elsinor in Spring 2022.

Ludger's latest book as editor is Sommerleithe by Klaus Weise, and is available now from Elsinor.

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LINKS:

Jetzt ein Tiger by Anthony Burgess, translated by Ludger Tolksdorf, at Elsinor (German)

Sommerleithe by Klaus Weise, edited by Ludger Tolksdorf, at Elsinor (German) 

Ludger Tolksdorf's website (German)

International Anthony Burgess Foundation 

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In this episode, we talk to writer James Walker about Saturday Night and Sunday Morning by Alan Sillitoe. The novel follows Arthur Seaton, a rebellious young factory worker who works all week so he can spend the weekends drinking and fraternising with married women. Sillitoe’s writing celebrates the working-class spirit of Arthur, and is a vital, alive depiction of the Nottingham streets in which he lives.

Alan Sillitoe was born in Nottingham in 1928. He took up writing, living in France and Spain where he began writing Saturday Night and Sunday Morning and The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner. He died in 2010 after writing over 70 works of fiction, non-fiction, poetry, drama, and children’s stories.

James Walker is a writer who specialises in the fiction of Nottingham. He is a former member of the Alan Sillitoe Committee and created The Sillitoe Trail, a multimedia digital platform in which he explored the enduring relevance of Saturday Night and Sunday Morning. His current project is Whatever People Say I Am, a comic series challenging stereotypes.

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BOOKS MENTIONED IN THIS EPISODE

By Alan Sillitoe:

A Man of His Time (2004)

By others:

Lady Chatterley's Lover by D.H. Lawrence (1960)

A Clockwork Orange by Anthony Burgess (1962)

The Killing Jar by Nicola Monaghan (2006)

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LINKS:

Sillitoe's Final Interview (by James Walker)

James Walker's Nottingham Essay on BBC Radio 3 (YouTube)

The Sillitoe Trail

Dawn of the Unread, an online graphic novel celebrating Nottingham's literary history, by James Walker

The Loneliness of the Lockdown Runner, an Instagram project by James Walker

James Walker's comic series Whatever People Say I Am

International Anthony Burgess Foundation

The theme music is Anthony Burgess's Concerto for Flute, Strings and Piano in D Minor. It is performed by No Dice Collective.

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You can join the conversation and tell us which 100th book you would add to Burgess's list by using the hashtag #99Novels on Twitter.

If you have enjoyed this episode, why not leave us a review and subscribe wherever you get your podcasts.

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

In this episode, Will Carr of the Burgess Foundation talks to academic and writer Marius Hentea about Henry Green’s 1939 novel Party Going, a strange and mysterious novel which deals with the complex social interactions of socialites and workers alike. It is by turns comic, lyrical and expressive, but is not necessarily easy to interpret.

Marius Hentea is Professor of English Literature at the University of Gothenburg. He has previously studied and taught at universities in France, Belgium, America and the UK. His main areas of research are modernism and the avant garde and he has published two books: Henry Green at the Limits of Modernism and Tata Dada: The Real Life and Celestial Adventures of Tristan Tzara. He is currently researching authorship and treason at the beginning of the Cold War.

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BOOKS MENTIONED IN THIS EPISODE

By Henry Green:

Living (1929)

Pack My Bag: A Self-Portrait (1940)

Loving (1949)

By others:

Vile Bodies by Evelyn Waugh (1930)

Afternoon Men by Anthony Powell (1931)

Correction by Thomas Bernhard (1975)

The Genesis of Secrecy: On the Interpretation of Narrative by Frank Kermode (1979)

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LINKS:

Henry Green at the Limits of Modernism by Marius Hentea (Sussex Academic Press)

International Anthony Burgess Foundation

The theme music is Anthony Burgess's Concerto for Flute, Strings and Piano in D Minor. It is performed by No Dice Collective.

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You can join the conversation and tell us which 100th book you would add to Burgess's list by using the hashtag #99Novels on Twitter.

If you have enjoyed this episode, why not leave us a review and subscribe wherever you get your podcasts.

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

In this episode, Andrew Biswell of the Burgess Foundation speaks to academic and writer Will Ghosh about A Bend in the River by V.S. Naipaul, a novel Burgess described as ‘beautifully composed […] with an almost Conradian power of description.’

First published in 1979, A Bend in the River is a disturbing work which explores the violence and disorder which often go hand in hand with aggressively nationalistic regimes. It is a complex novel about the difficulties of newly independent nations, and the ambiguous legacies of the colonial period.

Will Ghosh teaches Victorian and Modern Literature at Jesus College in the University of Oxford. His research focuses on Caribbean and South Asian literatures after 1945. He has written extensively about VS Naipaul, and published his first book, VS Naipaul, Caribbean Writing and Caribbean Thought, in 2020.

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BOOKS MENTIONED IN THIS EPISODE:

By V.S. Naipaul:

Miguel Street (1959)

A House for Mr Biswas (1961)

The Middle Passage (1962)

The Mimic Men (1967)

Guerillas (1975)

A Congo Diary (1980)

Among the Believers: An Islamic Journey (1981)

The Enigma of Arrival (1987)

India: A Million Mutinies Now (1990)

A Way in the World (1994)

Beyond Belief: Islamic Excursions Among the Converted Peoples (1998)

By others:

Buddenbrooks by Thomas Mann (1901)

The Autobiography of an Unknown Indian by Nirad C. Chaudhuri (1951)

The Novel Now by Anthony Burgess (1967)

The Dragon Can't Dance by Earl Lovelace (1979)

Offshore by Penelope Fitzgerald (1979)

Roots by Edward Kamau Braithwaite (1986)

The Blue Flower by Penelope Fitzgerald (1995)

The 100 Best Novels in English by Robert McCrum (2016)

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LINKS:

VS Naipaul, Caribbean Writing and Caribbean Thought by Will Ghosh at Oxford University Press

Will Ghosh's introduction to V.S. Naipaul

Will Ghosh in conversation with Homi K. Bhabha

International Anthony Burgess Foundation

The theme music is Anthony Burgess’s Concerto for Flute, Strings and Piano in D Minor, performed by No Dice Collective.

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You can join the conversation and tell us which 100th book you would add to Burgess's list by using the hashtag #99Novels on Twitter.

If you have enjoyed this episode, why not leave us a review and subscribe wherever you get your podcasts.

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

In this episode, Graham Foster of the Burgess Foundation talks to Avril Horner about The Bell by Iris Murdoch, a novel Burgess calls ‘intensely poetic’ and ‘beautifully organised’.

First published in 1958, The Bell tells the story of Dora Greenfield, an impulsive young woman, who moves with her husband to a lay religious community in the grounds of Imber Abbey. There, she discovers an old bell at the bottom of a lake, and sets in motion events that will expose secret desires and lead to tragic consequences.

Avril Horner is Emeritus Professor of English at Kingston University, London. She specialises in women’s writing and gothic literature and has published widely on authors such as Daphne du Maurier, Edith Wharton, and Iris Murdoch. Her latest book is Living on Paper: Letters from Iris Murdoch 1934-1995, which she edited with Anne Rowe, with whom she has also edited books on Iris Murdoch and morality and the texts and contexts of Iris Murdoch. She is currently working, with Sue Zlosnik on the book Comic Gothic, which will be released by Edinburgh University Press in 2023.

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BOOKS MENTIONED IN THIS EPISODE

By Iris Murdoch:

Under the Net (1954)

The Flight from the Enchanter (1956)

The Sandcastle (1957)

A Severed Head (1961)

The Unicorn (1963)

The Time of the Angels (1966)

The Nice and the Good (1968)

A Fairly Honourable Defeat (1970)

The Sovereignty of Good (1970)

The Black Prince (1973)

The Sea, The Sea (1978)

Nuns and Soldiers (1980)

The Book and the Brotherhood (1987)

The Message to the Planet (1989)

Existentialists and Mystics (1997)

By others:

The Need for Roots by Simone Weil (1952)

The Notebooks of Simone Weil (1954)

Who Was Changed and Who Was Dead by Barbara Comyns (1954)

The Skin Chairs by Barbara Comyns (1962)

The Essex Serpent by Sarah Perry (2016)

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LINKS:

Living on Paper: Letters from Iris Murdoch 1934-1995, ed by Avril Horner and Anne Rowe

The Iris Murdoch Society

International Anthony Burgess Foundation

The theme music is Anthony Burgess's Concerto for Flute, Strings and Piano in D Minor. It is performed by No Dice Collective.

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You can join the conversation and tell us which 100th book you would add to Burgess's list by using the hashtag #99Novels on Twitter.

If you have enjoyed this episode, why not leave us a review and subscribe wherever you get your podcasts.

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In this episode, Graham Foster of the Burgess Foundation talks to writer and academic Simon Malpas about Gravity's Rainbow by Thomas Pynchon.

Published in 1973, Gravity’s Rainbow has become one of the most revered American novels of the post-war period. It’s a hard novel to summarise, the plot being a complicated tangle of characters and situations, self-referential twists and historical detail, riotous humour and pointed satire. In his review of Gravity’s Rainbow in Ninety-Nine Novels, Anthony Burgess describes it as ‘the war book to end them all’, saying that it describes the obscenity of war in a way that was not available to the poets and novelists writing about the First World War.

Simon Malpas is a Senior Lecturer in English Literature at Edinburgh University, and has written an introduction to the work of Thomas Pynchon with Andrew Taylor which helps demystifying many of the themes and philosophies running through Pynchon’s novels: Thomas Pynchon by Simon Malpas and Andrew Taylor is published by Manchester University Press and out now.

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BOOKS MENTIONED IN THIS EPISODE

By Thomas Pynchon:

V (1963)

The Crying of Lot 49 (1966)

Mason and Dixon (1997)

Inherent Vice (2009)

Bleeding Edge (2013)

By others:

Ulysses by James Joyce (1922)

The Naked and the Dead by Norman Mailer (1948)

Catch-22 by Joseph Heller (1961)

MF by Anthony Burgess (1971)

Napoleon Symphony by Anthony Burgess (1974)

The Great War and Modern Memory by Paul Fussell (1975)

Dhalgren by Samuel Delaney (1975)

Beard's Roman Women by Anthony Burgess (1976)

1985 by Anthony Burgess (1978)

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LINKS:

Thomas Pynchon by Simon Malpas and Andrew Taylor at Manchester University Press

International Anthony Burgess Foundation

The theme music is Anthony Burgess's Concerto for Flute, Strings and Piano in D Minor. It is performed by No Dice Collective.

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You can join the conversation and tell us which 100th book you would add to Burgess's list by using the hashtag #99Novels on Twitter.

If you have enjoyed this episode, why not leave us a review and subscribe wherever you get your podcasts.

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

In this episode, Graham Foster of the Burgess Foundation talks to writer and academic Michael Mitchell about Heartland by Sir Wilson Harris.

Published in 1964, Heartland is a complex and experimental novel set in the rainforests of Guyana. The story follows Zachariah Stevenson as he ventures beyond the treeline and succumbs to madness. Harris’s writing is as dense as the forest it describes and the novel blends poetry and prose as Stevenson begins to question the boundaries between the living and the dead.

Michael Mitchell is a lecturer at the University of Paderborn in Germany, and an Honorary Fellow at the Yesu Persaud Centre for Caribbean Studies at the University of Warwick. He has written extensively on postcolonial literature, especially the works of Sir Wilson Harris. He has recently written introductions to the Wilson Harris novels Ascent to Omai, The Eye of the Scarecrow, and Heartland, all published by Peepal Tree Press.

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BOOKS MENTIONED IN THIS EPISODE

By Sir Wilson Harris:

The Palace of the Peacock (1960)

The Black Marsden: A Tabula Rasa Comedy (1972)

Companions of the Day and Night (1975)

Jonestown (1996) The Dark Jester (2001)

The Mask of the Beggar (2003)

The Ghost of Memory (2006)

By others:

The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde by Robert Louis Stevenson (1886)

The Secret of the Golden Flower by Lü Dongbin (trans. by Richard Wilhem, 1929)

Four Quartets by T.S. Eliot (1941)

Watt by Samuel Beckett (1953)

My Bones and My Flute by Edgar Mittelholzer (1955)

Wilson Harris: A Philosophical Approach by C.L.R. James (1965)

Darkness Visible by William Golding (1979)

Waiting for the Barbarians by J.M. Coetzee (1980)

Decolonising the Mind by Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o (1986)

The Heather Blazing by Colm Toibin (1992)

Remembering Babylon by David Malouf (1993)

Our Lady of Demerara by David Dabydeen (2004)

The Marvellous Equations of the Dread: A Novel in Bass Riddim by Marcia Douglas (2016)

Black Leopard, Red Wolf by Marlon James (2019)

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LINKS:

Micheal Mitchell's obituary of Wilson Harris in the Guardian

Wilson Harris at Peepal Tree Press:

New edition of Palace of the Peacock at Faber

International Anthony Burgess Foundation

The theme music is Anthony Burgess's Concerto for Flute, Strings and Piano in D Minor. It is performed by No Dice Collective

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If you have enjoyed this episode, why not leave us a review and subscribe wherever you get your podcasts.

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

In this episode, Graham Foster of the Burgess Foundation talks to novelist David Morrell about Giles Goat-Boy by John Barth.

Giles Goat-Boy is simultaneously one of the most revered and complex postmodern novels of the 1960s, and a strange patchwork of allegories, from the Bible to the events of the Cold War. Burgess describes the book as a 'work that extends the scope of the novel - or rather reminds it of the scope it has lost, along with a whimsical fantasticality best exemplified in Laurence Sterne's Tristram Shandy.'

David Morrell is best known for his novel First Blood, which introduced the world to John Rambo, later played by Sylvester Stallone in a series of films. He completed his PhD thesis on the novels of John Barth, which was later published as John Barth: An Introduction. More recently he has written a series of crime novels featuring the famed opium-eater Thomas de Quincy. This trilogy, beginning with Murder as a Fine Art, is available now from Mulholland Books. John Barth: An Introduction is currently available as an ebook.

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BOOKS MENTIONED IN THIS EPISODE:

By John Barth:

The Sot-Weed Factor (1960)

Lost in the Funhouse (1968)

The Tidewater Tales (1987)

By others:

The Hero: A Study in Tradition, Myth and Drama by Lord Raglan (1936)

Rogue Male by Geoffrey Household (1939)

The Hero with a Thousand Faces by Joseph Campbell (1949)

'Westward the Course of Empire Takes its Way' in Girl with Curious Hair by David Foster Wallace (1989)

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LINKS:

David Morrell's website

David Morrell on Twitter

International Anthony Burgess Foundation

The theme music is Anthony Burgess's Concerto for Flute, Strings and Piano in D Minor. It is performed by No Dice Collective.

-------

You can join the conversation and tell us which 100th book you would add to Burgess's list by using the hashtag #99Novels on Twitter. If you have enjoyed this episode, why not leave us a review and subscribe wherever you get your podcasts.

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

In this episode, Will Carr of the Burgess Foundation talks to writer and academic Alison Arant about Wise Blood by Flannery O'Connor.

Published in 1952, Wise Blood is Flannery O’Connor’s first novel and shows many of the themes that would come to characterise her short but extraordinary career. Set in the American South, and dealing with a cast of grotesques, it is a novel of complex religious themes and has come to be known as a classic of twentieth century literature.

Alison Arant is Associate Professor and Chair of the English Department at Wagner College in Staten Island, New York. Her research focusses on the American South, African American literature and women’s literature. Her most recent publication is Reconsidering Flannery O’Connor, which she edited with Jordan Colfer. This collection examines new theoretical approaches to O’Connor’s work and interrogates established views of her fiction and legacy. It is available now from the University Press of Mississippi.

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BOOKS MENTIONED IN THIS EPISODE:

By Flannery O'Connor:

Mystery and Manners: Occasional Prose (1957)

Everything That Rises Must Converge (1965)

'A Good Man is Hard to Find' in The Complete Short Stories (1971)

By others:

Earthly Powers by Anthony Burgess (1980)

The Bluest Eye by Toni Morrison (1970)

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LINKS:

Reconsidering Flannery O'Connor at University Press of Mississippi

The Andalusia Institute Website

International Anthony Burgess Foundation

The theme music is Anthony Burgess's Concerto for Flute, Strings and Piano in D Minor. It is performed by No Dice Collective.

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You can join the conversation and tell us which 100th book you would add to Burgess's list by using the hashtag #99Novels on Twitter.

If you have enjoyed this episode, why not leave us a review and subscribe wherever you get your podcasts.

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

For the first episode in our new series, Graham Foster of the Burgess Foundation talks to Enrico Terrinoni about James Joyce's Finnegans Wake, one of the first novels on Burgess's list.

Finnegans Wake has a dreamlike, circular narrative, which ostensibly tells the story of the pub landlord Humphrey Chimpden Earwicker and his family, who live in Dublin’s Chapelizod neighbourhood. But it is so much more than that, and threatens to escape the categorisation of literature itself.

Enrico Terrinoni is Professor of English Literature at the Università per Stranieri di Perugia, and Professor of Translation at IULM University of Milan. He has held many fellowship at universities in Ireland and America, including University College Dublin and Notre Dame University. As a translator into Italian, he has worked on authors such as George Orwell, Muriel Spark, Brendan Behan, Oscar Wilde, and George Bernard Shaw. He translated Finnegans Wake into Italian with Fabio Pedone, and in 2021 published the first ever bilingual annotated translation of Ulysses. He is currently working on a book about the “quantum theory of literature” and “probabilistic interpretation” and editing, with Declan Kiberd and Catherine Wilsdon, a book on Ulysses entitled The Book about Everything which will be published in June 2022 by Head of Zeus.

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BOOKS MENTIONED IN THIS EPISODE:

By James Joyce:

Ulysses (1922)

The Shorter Finnegans Wake (edited by Anthony Burgess, 1966)

Finnegans Wake Audiobook (narrated by Barry McGovern and Marcella Riordan, 2021)

By others:

Here Comes Everybody by Anthony Burgess (1965)

The Egyptian Book of the Dead (c. 1250BCE)

The Books at the Wake by James S. Atherton (1959)

Bartleby, the Scrivener by Herman Melville (1853)

Lanark by Alasdair Gray (1981)

1982, Janine by Alasdair Gray (1984)

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LINKS:

Enrico Terrinoni's bilingual Ulysses at Bompiani

Enrico Terrinoni's book about Joyce in Rome, Su tutti i vivi e i morti: Joyce a Roma at Feltrinelli Editore

The Book About Everything, edited by Enrico Terrinoni, Declan Kiberd and Catherine Wilsdon at Head of Zeus (pre-order)

International Anthony Burgess Foundation

The theme music is Anthony Burgess's Concerto for Flute, Strings and Piano in D Minor. It is performed by No Dice Collective.

-------

You can join the conversation and tell us which 100th book you would add to Burgess's list by using the hashtag #99Novels on Twitter.

If you have enjoyed this episode, why not leave us a review and subscribe wherever you get your podcasts.

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

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In Quest for Fire, Peter played Mikr, a member of the Paleolithic Ulam tribe, who are searching for the source of the fire they need to survive. Since Quest for Fire, his first film, Peter has become the film industry's leading expert in movement direction and choreography, especially of animal and non-human characters. His work can be seen in films such as Greystoke: The Legend of Tarzan, Gorillas in the Mist and The Island of Doctor Moreau. In this episode of the podcast, Peter reminisces about his time on the set of Quest for Fire, meeting Anthony Burgess and Desmond Morris, and dealing with stampeding woolly mammoths in the highlands of Scotland.

For more information about Anthony Burgess and to find out how you can support the work of the Burgess Foundation, visit www.anthonyburgess.org

If you have enjoyed this podcast, don't forget to leave us a review and subscribe wherever you get your podcasts.

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